Finished Wing Commander Prophecy: Secret Ops
The same dull mission design of Wing Commander 3 only with almost no "story moments", and most dialogue is exposition that could have been easily used as comm chatter, and occur only every 8/10 missions, the rest is essentially devoid of any of the personality Wing Commader games (even the Prophecy base game) usually have.
The two new characters, Spyder and Amazon, don't have any dialogue (apart form the usual canned sentences) and Stiletto has no dialogues, the only ones talking in cutscenes other than the protagonist are Maestro and Zero.
I get it that they didn't have the money for cutscenes but at least having some more comm chatter during missions shouldn't have been that much of an expense as Mark Hamill was put on a bus in the main game and the cast had been restricted to the new generation anyway.
The few mission that aren't "search and destroy" or "patrol" (which are the same thing in the end: hit "a", destroy things until you get permission to hit "a" again, rinse and repeat) get really furustrating because of the overly simplified controls, the lack all those hotkeys you use for targeting in Tie Fighter or in Freespace in a game that came a few years after the former is simply unforgivable.
The game is at its best in the simple dogfighting but after countless waves of enemies tends to get extremely repetitive, and without the narrative focus of the base game, it gets old really fast.
In the end the best of the series remains Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, 3 and 5 are good, Secret Ops sufficient and the first two while playable have aged very badly regarding gameplay.
