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Not the Wing Commander we fell in love with...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 15 / 21
Date: February 14, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Origin seems to be in the business of reinventing their trademark series that first gave them credit to the "We Create Worlds" slogan. However, in the process of making them 3D accelerator and masses-friendly Origin has also managed to undermine everything that had made the series great, namely its characters and compelling stories. Now this outing which puts closure on the WC series isn't nearly as bad as Ultima Ascension, but it's severely lacking nonetheless.

It makes sense to try to start anew with a fresh-faced protagonist who has yet to make the name for himself that previous legend Chris Blair forged in the last four games, especially with Mark Hamill entering his twilight years and whose heavy uniform pips and medals may alienate newcomers. That's all good. What's not all good is that the choice they made to take over the pilot's seat, Lt. Casey, has all the spine of a jellyfish and the verbal acuity of a junior high school wallflower at his first party. Even in the later half of the game when his piloting skills have started to beget him some respect from his peers, his attempts to affect the grizzled demeanor of a kid who had to grow up too fast and pull his own weight on deck is as laughable as his previously innocuous self. As for the rest of the cast, they even more annoying. All of the men act like egotistical frat boys, and all the women like snotty ice-queens. Even returning loose canon on deck Maniac looks unbelievably uncomfortable on-screen, and in the process hams up his role. You could care less about these superficial cardboard newcomers, in fact, the only relief comes from old comrades reprising roles and making cameos, namely Blair, Hawk, and even brief appearances of Admiral Wilfred and Col. Decker. Unfortunately, the former two end up dying during the game, leaving you to dogs of these petulant Gen-X-Wing jocks.

The plot is unapologetically formulaic: Evil aliens invade our space and its up to our heroes to thwart 'em. The missions cover familiar, if somewhat banal ground from previous WC installments along the escort/patrol/strike variety, though not nearly as innovative as the ones from WC IV. The new alien foes are fearsome enough in their sleek and reptilian splendor, actually bearing an uncanny resemblance to species 8479 from Star Trek: Voyager, but they are given no context. By contrast, they have none of the culture or history of the Kilrathi that was so captivating, even delivering a renegade in your midst in WC II, Hobbes. You really learn nothing about the alien race in Prophecy or the purpose of their invasion, merely some pseudo-theological drivel about they being the harbingers of a space-age apocalypse, but the premise falls flat. One gets the impression that they really exist to merely show off the new ship models. You'll find the one-sided design of the plot to be an enormous step backward from the complex conspiracies woven in WC 4's civil war.

The game ends on one of those portentous sci-fi sequel-promising notes ("They'll be back, y'know"). Except Origin is no longer creating straight-forward single-player epics, so one is forced to ask exactly what was the point of breaking all this supposed new ground if nothing is going to be done to evolve it and its new cast beyond their rote and insipid beginnings. Then again, since Origin seems to have been unable to churn a decent game since 1996, maybe that's not such a bad thing. Sure, the engine looks gorgeous, and all of the fighters and cap ships have undergone complete cosmetic changes, but all the eye-candy in the world can't cover up the lack of a compelling plot or characters, qualities that made the series endure eight years. In summation, the discriminating space sim gamer is better of with Descent: Freespace II, X: Beyond the Frontier, or hell, wait a few months for Chris Roberts of Digital Anvil to release Starlancer, he being the pre-Prophecy WC man who really knew what it was about.

A sad ending to a great franchise...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: September 05, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Wing Commander Prophecy is the last in the line of this epic gaming series. Much like other epics such as Beowulf, and Star Trek, Prophecy does well in ending the Wing Commander saga plot wise, so that Chris Roberts (The games creator) can go on to make a movie on the first three games of the franchise. Prophecy does feature returning players in Mark Hamill (Star Wars, Time Runner), Tom Wilson (Back To the Future), and Ginger Allen (Formerly dated Charlie Sheen), but only Wilson gets significant video time in this poorly acted sequel.

The game picks up where WC IV kind of left off, in that the Confederation is at peace. Unlike WC IV where the missions and characters slowly lead you into the plot mission after mission, WC IV leads you right in on the first mission. From there on out the plot of the game becomes more and more like an episode of Fear Factor, in that just when you think the guys you are fighting are bad enough the movie in the game goes out and makes them even worse. This is a horrible plot device consider the insectoid like bad guys that you fight are fairly easy to kill, in large numbers at that as well. The game's plot continues to dry up even more in the games attempt to bring an end to the adventures in the WC universe. Most of WC's best plotlines from Wing Commander 2 and Wing Commander 3 were all tied up at the end of Wing Commander IV, on top of that most of the characters who made those plots work got killed off in WC IV, so you can basically throw out the window any chance that this game is going to involve anything more than a bunch of guys sitting in the Rec. Room talking about how many bugs they are going to squash on the next mission. Mark Hamill's Blair character was at his best when Blair was in constant clash with his adversary Admiral Tolwyn, but with Tolwyn gone in this game Blair becomes a lifeless stone trapped into being nothing short of a character that offers advice to other troubled characters in the game (better known as Wilson from Home Imporvement syndrome). Blair does this once in disk one, and then dissappears for disk2, afterwhich he eventually reappears in disk3 and does it again. More importantly the other characters in the game are poorly developed, there are only a handful of situations in the game where characters open up to you, after which they ususally just dissappear into the purgatory of being your "friend" and never to talk to you for the rest of the game. If you know the ending's to Beowulf and Star Trek Generations you can pretty much guess what ends up happening to Blair (who you played as for the first 4 games) at the end of this one, serving as the climax to this poor plot. The ending in itself is a big let down, and the movie within the game fails to really tie up all the loose ends of the Wing Commander universe gamers have come to love.

Gameplay is the only reason why I gave this thing an extra star than I had intended, simply put the game follows the tradition of the WC flying engine. That is pretty much where it ends as the WC engine is hurt mainly by a pathetic race of aliens who appear in large numbers and really just play to shoot you and get shot at the same time. The AI for this game really misses the point of playing a WC game which is to out-manuver your opposition much like WC's III & IV where flying skills were needed heavily in order to come even close to defeating the enemy. This game focuses more on the shooting aspect of everything which kind of shows that for the most part space combat has taken a step backwards on the evolution scale.

More insulting are the ships that you pilot, the vampire, tigershark and destroyer are all loaded with somewhat useless ordinance, and when you fly bombers (Much unlike III) you are very limited in being able to fly against any non-cap ship. Also if you have played IV you would have realized the enormous technological step backwards the Confederation has taken for being essentially a few years ahead of what happened in 4. In 4 you got cloaking devices, flash paks, and 2 torpedoes on a ship that can travel faster than any ship in Prophecy along with much better guns an Auto Aim type system and you even got to choose what ship you flew along with what ordinance you carried. In prophecy all of those options are gone along with those ships which were basically used in two guys versus the world type missions. More importantly WC IV allowed you to choose your wingman an important feature missing completely from this game. Prophecy does have one good point though in the invention of ship-to-turret missiles, unforunately they are only on 1 ship and I think you only get 6 of them for ships that have many more turrets than that. The poor gameplay continues as you are no longer able to make the Morale changing choices in between conversations. In WC III & IV this was a great part of the game where if you chose to be a jerk to everyone on board the crew responded by not listening to the orders you gave them and more importantly their fighting became substantially weaker as you kept berating them through the game. It also added flavor to the character of Blair as well as with those who he interacted with making you actually care about the characters, and not just viewing them as faceless pilots saying the same things over and over again.

To be precise, don't buy this game unless you are that desperate to find out what ends up happening in the WC universe in this last installment of the WC gaming series. It amazes me how easily Chris Roberts betrayed Wing Commander by selling it off to FOX to make a crummy movie that nobody ended up watching. Wing Commander deserved better, and with the release of this game for the Game Boy Advance, hopefully its success will relaunch WC & Origin to do it better one last time.

sub par

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 5
Date: July 17, 2001
Author: Amazon User

orgin really screwed up with this one. maybe they were trying to kill the series but this was the worest wc game ever. all the numerous incarnations, wing commander 1,2,3,4 and academy were awsome. the story was so immersive that after you played you really felt it was worth your time. i play wing commander 4 still at the beginning of every summer and everytime its like watching an epic. too bad the movie didnt adopt the story of the game! would have been so much better. wing prophecy was so uninspired in story that i had no interest in the plot. i was only interested in finishing the darn thing. dont buy this game, borrow it from your friends so you can say you played it. oh and yeah they killed blair. today is a sad day for the confederation

Much the same

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 6
Date: April 05, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Yet another in the turgid 'Wing Commander' series, 'Prophecy'thankfully reduces the amount of dull, plotless FMV, whilst notsignificantly improving the gameplay, which doesn't seem to have evolved very much since the original 'Wing Commander'. Your ship still doesn't 'feel' as if it is flying through space, the supposedly-invincible bad guys are more of a nuisance than a threat, and if you fail a mission it will probably be because you failed to protect something that you were not told about.

Imagine watching a bad, low-budget science fiction film whilst playing a modern homage to 'Star Raiders' and you have the game in a nutshell. END

Impressive, but it just ain't Wing Commander...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: August 13, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Wing Commander: Prophecy is a pretty damned impressive game; the ships are cool, the gameplay is great and the visuals are stunning. However, it seems to be missing something, especially compared with probably the best game of the series - Wing Commander IV, The Price of Freedom. The cutscenes are uninspired, despite the return of favourites Mark Hamill and Tom Wilson as Blair and Maniac; the other actors seem to be either grappling with the at-times cliched script or just not really doing a good job. The plot is... well, it doesn't seem to be anything we haven't seen before, and the mysterious aliens eventually turn into insectoid Kilrathi, with the usual curses across the ship-to-ship radio.

I admit, I was more into the Wimg Commander series for the cutscenes, although they were always supported by decent gameplay; space combat fans might get more out of this game than me. But I think people who got into Wing Commander for its blend of space combat and story will be somewhat disappointed.

Nice graphics, no story

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: June 17, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This is a very pretty game. The graphics were top of the line when this title was released and it still looks very nice. However, the strength of the first 4 Wing Commanders was the storyline. The filmed scenes in WCIII and WCIV told interesting stories that brought you into the game. The filmed scenes in this version serve little to move the story along and are a waste (I am sure they cost quite a bit to make). Furthermore the missions are fairly repetitious - you are either in a dogfight or on a bombing run. Try Independence War if you want a challenging space sim or X-Wing Alliance or Freespace if you want a more traditional but fun space shooter.

Wing Commander, sorta....

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 3
Date: July 21, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Having grown up with many of the original (and quite excellent) Wing Commander games, I was a bit dissapointed by this one. I found the gameplay was good but the story seemed to fall apart. The expansion was pretty sad, they didn't even take time to put any film cutscenes in. It was fun but I doubt I will be going back and playing this one again soon like the other WC.

This was my first Space sim, and I wasn't disappointed

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 9 / 12
Date: November 13, 1999
Author: Amazon User

With the Mechwarrior games being my only Simulation experience, I bought this one mainly for the cool pictures on the box. For once, they did justice to the frosty disc within. Playing Lt. Casey, you fly missions against a strange invading foe, intent on extinguishing all life they find. Spanning three discs, I lost count of the missions I flew. I was so involved, I actually jumped when I was blown up! I've never played a game that left me shaking afterwards...this one grabs you by the neck, wrings you out, and leaves you exhausted but wanting more. Keeping it from 5 stars is a small glitch that makes the mouse pointer travel across the screen by itself, making menu items difficult to choose at times. A small flaw indeed, but an annoying one.

Prophecy is worth it!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: December 26, 1999
Author: Amazon User

Wing Commander is a space simulation series that is unrivaled. Prophecy is not the best of the series, but the improved spaceflight and graphics make it a great game. Anybody interested in space simulation should be interested in this game.

Great Game , Cheesy Story

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: May 04, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Excelent graphics and a huge improvement over WC4.Its a challenge for all levels of space jocks. It is Overall a very enjoyable game, with the best 3D flight sim engine I have ever seen, dispite not being very hardware intensive. The cutscenes are a bit on the shallow side, but the gameplay really makes up for it.

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