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Freespace Lite

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 49 / 61
Date: April 30, 2000
Author: Amazon User

My god, I can't believe what passes as a good game nowadays. Being an extreme fan of the Wing Commander series, as well as other space simulations like Descent Freespace, I was more then ecstatic when I first bought Starlancer. After playing the game for 5 hours, I was disappointed. 2 days later I was downright appalled.

Descent Freespace 2 raised the bar for what a space sim should be. Starlancer is nothing more then a colorized version of Wing Commander. Sure, there's alot of action, and the graphics are purty, but it could have been better - alot better. Actually they should have called it Freespace Lite - For Dumbies.

First of all, it's downright impossible. Even at the easiest setting, I barely managed to finish each level. Why? The enemies weren't' that hard to destroy. It had to do with the fact that your ship, no matter which ship you choose, couldn't carry anything worthwhile. In Descent Freespace 2 (DS2), the ships could carry dozens of missiles of various types. In Starlancer, you have 3-7 hardpoints which carry one missile each. Yep, one missile. Except for the screamers, which come in 20, but they have no lock-on capacity. Imagine trying to kill 10-20 ships each level with 4 missiles. And the worse part is you can't reload!

And then there's the fuel. Even though it's 2160, you're still using solid fuel, so if you tend to use the afterburner (which you need alot because everything is so far apart), you'll have to install fuel pods, which limits the missiles you can carry. So now you're left with 2 missiles, which makes the game even harder.

And then there's no logic behind it. At the beginning of mission 8, the enemy carrier is launching torpedoes at your carrier. Your carrier informs you to just attack the fighters and disregard the torpedoes, because their cannons will handle it. Yet 30 seconds later, when enemy bombers jump in and start launching ALOT of torpedoes at your carrier, the carrier begs you to shoot down all the torpedoes before they are destroyed. So you command your wingmen to destroy your bomber, but since they're so inept, it takes them 15 minutes to destroy 1 bomber. Meanwhile you're chasing back and forth shooting down torpedoes. I had to replay that mission at least 8 times because the wingmen couldn't tell the difference between a bomber and a hair dryer.

Communication Remember how in DS2 you had complete control of your wingmen? In Starlancer you only have three options: help me, ignore this enemy, or go home. What happen to guard? What happen to rearm? Even though half of the missions require you to guard a freighter or convoy, you can't even tell the wingmen to guard it. And the worst part is, on the keyboard, you use 1-6 to change camera view. Pressing "C" will bring up the communications display, then you hit "1" for talking to the enemy, "2" for talking to your wing, etc.. But since it's so slow, if you hit C then 2 really fast, it will change the camera view! So if you need to issue commands in a hurry, you can't, because the screen will change view! Who's the genius behind this?

Graphics The graphics are the best part of the game. The engine is basically the same as Privateer 2, except with some heavy tweaks. The blackness of space is replaced by distant nebula and asteroid fields. But the odd thing is, you're flying around in our solar system - there's not suppose to be nebula in this area. Ships blow up in little pieces after you destroy them. Each weapon has its own look and feel. Missiles leave a trail of smoke after you fire them. But it's not nearly as good as Freespace 2, where deep space is alive with nebulas, comets, galaxies, planets, etc.

Also there's little things. Every time you play another mission, you have to change your HUD settings. You can choose what displays are shown - missiles, guns, damage, etc. If you turn it off on a level, when you start the next one, it jumps back to the default HUD display. So you have to waste time setting the displays back to what they were before. And then you can't bypass the in-game cinematics, which just takes forver.

Starlancer should have been called Wing Commander 6. Except for the graphic overhaul, the introduction of online gaming (which is pretty cool) and the new ships, it's the exact same gameplay, same commands, and same missions. After 2 days of Starlancer I went back to playing Wing Commander 4. Sure it's outdated, but at least it's got Mark Hamill.

It's so-so.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: May 25, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I won't rehash some of the comments made by other reviewers here, as they seem to be right on (with the exception of the gushing fanboys).

This is a fairly decent space combat sim that looks and feels like a retro-styled Wing Commander 6, which is hardly surprising considering the source. No new ground is really being broken here in the way that FreeSpace 2 did, with its massive capital ship combat and nebula missions.

The graphics are good, and I got great framerates on my Celeron 400 with TNT2 graphics card. However, there's really heavy distance filtering applied to the textures on the ships, so if a ship isn't right in your face, it looks like a brown-grey blob. This is particularly bad because the game relies heavily on in-engine cutscenes, which come out looking awful this way. You also can't skip the cutscenes, which is completely annoying.

The fighter ship design is very cool--they all look like vicious WWII fighters--but the capship design isn't nearly as good, with one or two exceptions. Capship combat and anti-capship missions are a big letdown when compared to FS2.

As others have stated, the AI is profoundly stupid, and your options for controlling them are very limited. You're basically alone out there.

The flight model is also weird. You lose turning maneuverability when you slow down, which is the opposite of most space sims. This makes the game into a lot of high-speed passing and turning with a great deal of gunfire, as the ships don't mount many missiles (and the missiles are both easily evaded and usually ineffective), and there's no standard rearming in-mission.

What does make the game replayable is cooperative multiplayer, which you can play on the Zone--you can replay any of the campaign missions with others.

Deathmatch multiplayer is a different story, however. There are a lot of fun variants on deathmatch, but the actual playing of it is bad. There's a great deal of lag warping and other weirdness in deathmatch, even if you have a blazing connection to the net. You'll explode without even knowing you were being shot at; you'll get killed by the guy that you are drilling right in front of you because he has actually come around behind you and shot you, only you never saw that updated on your screen. So deathmatch becomes far less skill than luck, and not very fun.

Conclusion: you might have some fun with this if you're bored and looking for a new space action fix, but don't expect it to be the Next Great Thing, as it's pretty much more of the same. If you've never played FreeSpace 2, you owe it to yourself to check that out first before committing to Starlancer.

One final note: The force feedback on this game is absolutely the best I've ever experienced. It almost is reason alone to try out the game. For the first time, force feedback actually figures prominently in the gameplay; you hesitate to turn on certain weapons because your stick will be shaking so hard you won't be able to hit the target. It definitely adds a lot of fun factor to the flying. I wish other games' implementations of force feedback were as good.

Not bad at all for its price

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: December 30, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I was impressed by this game since I expected so little. FreeSpace2-like graphics (meaning good) and gameplay. Ships carry some momentum (instead of always flying where they point), you have side thrusters so that you can strafe, and instead of recharging afterburners, you have a set amount of fuel for the the extra speeed. There's a lot of dialogue during the action, which can be a little annoying. Same old bad physics as with all space "simulators" -- limited speed, moving faster gives you more manueverability, etc. But the game's fun as long as you're looking for simple, good-looking space combat. And by the way, this is a Chris Roberts game, meaning it's Wing Commander under a different name.

Good graphics countered by Artificial Ineptitude

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: September 05, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Starlancer reminds me of Wing Commander Prophecy and Secret Ops. The graphics are, of course, much better, to the point of being amazing. The missions are nicely done, with enough surprises to keep a player content.
However. The friendly AI is *amazingly* stupid. I've watched FIVE wingmen go up against a SINGLE enemy fighter (stealth fighter, but even so), and within minutes, 3 were down, and the other two didn't make any headway. Compared to Freespace 2, this is pathetic. Freespace 2 offered EXCELLENT friendly AI . . . as did Wing Commander IV, for instance. Prophecy and Secret Ops were not as good, but still head and shoulders above Starlancer. I could live with that, since the player is the hero and should be given the limelight. Two things, though: 1) On the killboard, other pilots, those who excel only when it's time to leave you handling the difficult tasks, get lots of kills. Certainly not in the course of missions you, the player, fly, as they don't do much, aside from yelling a lot and getting shot down. Yet despite this, they get kills galore. 2) The ENEMY AI isn't much better. Compared to Freespace 2, the AI is simply inept. In Freespace 2, surviving a battle against five enemy fighters was very, very difficult, even on medium difficulty. In Starlancer, I routinely managed to take out NINE Basilisks without breaking into sweat. Whereas Freespace 2 ships will dodge, weave, and fling missiles at you to get you off their tails, Starlancer's ships will usually only dodge a little. Another annoying thing is that the cutscenes cannot be skipped. Usually, hitting Escape (or Space) will allow a player to skip a cutscene, which can be useful when you have to replay a mission for the umpteenth time because your wingmates decided not to carry out orders. The cutscenes themselves are quite pretty, but they did not excite me the same way Freespace 2's did. Starlancer could have been a lot more -- if the both the friendly and enemy AI had been done right. As it is, I got the impression that Starlancer was rushed out half-finished. Finally, there is no patch available whatsoever, despite quite a few issues with soundcards. That's why I haven't given more than three stars.

Fun missions, but not very compelling...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: June 01, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I recently finished this game and I have to say that the single-player hasn't left me with a great aftertaste. Unlike the Wing Commander series, there isn't any plot in-between missions, hence no character development. We're limited to getting to know our so-called wingmen through in-game dialogue. Despite the lack of a compelling story, the gameplay is still pretty challenging for the seasoned gamer and the missions offer a good variety of objectives.

Not that fun...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: February 01, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I am a big fan of space sim games. I bought Wing Commander, Star wars, and other really good space sim games. Starlancer was a bit of a disapointment for me. I was expecting from the guys who created Wing commander (An Awesome game!) a better game. The graphics are compelling, and even if you run it on a 200mhz 2mb pci card the graphics do come out quite good and it isn't jerky. The plot is a okay, although it is getting harder and harder for those guys to make a compelling plot for a narrow genre. The interesting points are the missions and the people. the missions are varied and you never really know what's going to happen next, the mission objectives change often so that isntead of escorting that convoy, you go and take out a capital ship or spy on the enemy. there is also a rich experiance in the cockpit. your squad mates talk to you and make you feel part of the game. But the missions are hard, and after playing it for a while you get bored after failing to complete the fourth mission twenty times. you dont have many missiles and if you fire them the chances of their hitting the target are 1 in 100. Although this can be a good thing, if you don't have the right ship, you can, and will, be trying to shoot down some guy for twenty minutes before he blows up. Anyway, do what you want, but think twice before buying this game

Fairly decent game

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: November 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Overall, the game is good but it does lack in many ways due to it's script. Much of the storyline is scripted so during a combat dogfight, an enemy charcter cannot, repeat, cannot be killed. This is espically noticable with nikolai petrov. I had tailed him and got into the kill slot and pounded him with the main guns and screamer missiles. His shields were gone, but the armor plating would not go down below three units. Later in the game he dies just as easy as any othrer enemy.
The plot variations are kind of nice. Failing to accomplish a certain objective will lead to more difficulity later in the game. Not destroying the warp gate will allow for sudden cap ship appearances later on. Fun to play, but overall it's o.k.

Big Trouble For Moose and Squirrel

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 14
Date: April 24, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I, too, was one of the ones lucky enough to be chosen for the Beta test of this game. While the hype surrounding this game is immense, it is not underserved. The graphics engine and immersion factors on this game meet and excede what anyone could hope for. This game is truly spectacular, visually- far exceeding what one has come to expect from Microsoft's publishing arm.

Ther's one problem, and a big one, at that.

The designers of this game are lauded for their past work on all the Wing Commander sagas...scads of praise. And they are equally condemned for that atrocious ... movie ... that was served up as the "Wing Commander Movie." What I don't understand is why the reviews of Starlancer so far haven't touched on how downright horrible the acting and writing is all those pretty CGI movies. Russians as bad guys? C'mon folks. Could you have come up with a more dog-eared set of villains? And the utterly hopeless set of "motivations" for the cartoonish villains is almost as bad as the wretched Boris and Natasha accents.

We've played all those Wing Commander titles for a pure sense of escapism coupled with Space Opera plotlines. They always satisfied on some level. The Roberts' make a damn good action-sim, but should we be forced sit through their stifled movie careers, again? I want those 88 minutes of my life that I spent watching the WC movie back. And the dreadful writing aspects that mar Starlancer bring back the bad taste in my mouth from the movie. Sigh...it's not even campy. Just bad.

If you can get past the lame-duck backstory, the actual game is a stellar example of what can be done in this action genre. If the writing had been even average, Starlancer would have merited 5 stars (it's that beautiful).

Starlancer

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: May 05, 2000
Author: Amazon User

When I first played Starlancer, I was VERY impressed. The graphics may be it's best feature, other than the fun missions. What I like about it is that you don't play the same kind of mission over and over again., they are pretty much different. Some aspects may be the same, but the setting always makes it different.

The gameplay is great! Downing your fist enemy will be historic to you, as you fly by you will see the debris (and mabye the pilot) of the fantastoc explotions. The missions are nice and long, so the game will last. If only there was an in-game save feature. The story ties the game together well with in-mission events. The sound is great too. Except for the constant "ARGGHHH!" and "NOOO" of the downed Russian fighters, everything is great.

The ships are cool, and I love how you can land during a mission. Multiplayer is the funnest I've played yet, and the game will run fine on a 56k modem. And if your stick on a mission, log on and find some guys to help you beat it-hence-co-operative gameplay. Deathmatch is better, though.

Starlancer is great, and for the guy who said Russians as bad guys were bad, the designers wanted a change from furry lions and wanted a more close to home conflict. BUY THIS GAME!

Alot of fun but it's no Freespace 2

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: January 12, 2001
Author: Amazon User

The graphics, sound and even if the flight controls fairly simplistic, they work well. This game is great for serious space-sim jockies who want to have some quick fun.

Despite what some other critics said, this game is remarkably easy. The only mission that is really tough (almost impossible) is the very last mission. Mission difficulty depends alot on what ship and weapons you pick during the pre-sortie briefing. You can choose some ships with alot of armor and an "auto-targeting" system which turns alot of missions into a turkey-shoot or you can pick moderately armored and armed fighters for an extra challenge.

Enemy ships "blows up real good"; a few solid shots can take down the toughest opponent, unlike Wing Commander Prophecy. Capitol ships blow up nicely as well.

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