Privateer 2: The Darkening

I played this game when it originally came out. I remember enjoying the game for the most part, and played it like it was Privateer. About halfway through the game, it suddenly became literally impossible to win the plotline battles. I would end up with seemingly endless waves of enemies. I started the game over and only played nothing but the plotline missions and easily beat the game. The game was so poorly designed as to force you to focus on the main plotline, or you could not win. The plot was okay, just too short. It took all the enjoyment out of the game. On a side note, the game did have the same ludicrous Wing Commander “feature” where you could end up with shields so strong that it was faster and easier to just ram a lot of the enemies. That and the capital ship battles where all you had to do to win was literally park your ship IN the engine exhaust cones. As far as I remember, none of the capital ships could fire into that blind spot. The game ignored the fact that your ship would be incinerated if you got anywhere near the enemy’s engine exhaust.

This game either runs too fast or too slow. Even the original game had issues with loading up when it had too much to draw, which is where Origin dropped the ball with ALL of their games including the entire WC series. The stories are great but the game play is horrible. A shame GOG picked it right back up and ran with it as is. I was hoping the FR issue would have been solved but it wasn't. I am a master of DosBox yet there is no setting or combination of settings that will help with the speed of light or slow as molasses frame rates. I just deleted it now after two wasted days of trying to make it work properly. Not worth the headaches trying to fix this "white elephant" sorry.

Really I have been quite happy with most GOG ports, but this one in particular is quite lacking. The game does run, but you'll find the speed of the game swings from blindingly fast to single frame crawls right out of the GOG install. Seems whoever did QA on this port just made sure it booted and didn't actually enter any spaceflight gameplay. Anyhow, here's the settings I used to get the game running at playable speeds and consistently. Also worthy of note is a Windows based patch I also tried to use, but admittedly my goal was the run the game on my Steam Deck with Proton. The Windows patch ran, but doesn't have support for any inputs on the Steam Deck (even with a USB keyboard and mouse), so I had to keep poking at running the DOSBox version GOG packed. Least it patched Privateer 2 to the latest version, which GOG did not do for us. The dosbox_privateer2.conf file needs to be edited a bit: Under [sdl] output needs to be changed: output=opengl Under [cpu] core and cycles need to be changed: core=auto cycles=max This had the game running smoothly and well enough to skirmish in gameplay. If you prefer the game to run a little slower, change cycles to auto instead of max: cycles=auto Before settling on these settings I also tried the p2.zip patch here, but as I shared above, I couldn't get any input working on the Steam Deck with Proton (even with a USB keyboard and mouse): https://www.wcnews.com/chatzone/threads/complete-wc-gog-fixes-and-tweaks.27176/ Feel free to unpack that zip if the above DOSBox config file edit doesn't do the job alone. Hopefully this effort makes the game playable for anyone else giving this game a new try. I am not alone in being disappointed with this port if you read other reviews or search online. GOG is usually better than this, least with other games I've gotten from here. That said, I'm happy to try this game again after so many years and thankful GOG at least got us most of the way there with getting the game to boot.

This game actually has a lot going for it. The cutscenes are entertaining (and really the only reason to play the game nowadays if I'm being completely honest), the writing is good and there's some great world-building (think grungy, dystopic, Star Wars-y; it's a real shame this setting has not been revisited). Pure single-player games of this genre haven't been released in decades(?), so it's refreshing in that regard, and although it's an open-world game with optional missions, they're all kinda dull - excluding the ones that don't have cutscenes. I also liked the enemy taunts ("I am the grim rea-pah!"). It is not free of problems however. The controls are a major issue; modern joysticks are not compatible without some hacking which I was uninclined to do. Hence, space combat (which is completely unavoidable BTW) is done awkwardly through the mouse. Battles take way too long; I imagine this might be helped somewhat by buying more powerful weapons, but I didn't get past the second tier laser, which was still really weak. Maybe I just suck, but I enjoyed the combat in Elite and Wing Commander 4 more. There are some really questionable design choices. Landing on planets is more frustrating than it needs to be, you can ONLY SAVE ON PLANETS (!!), and planning trade routes and choosing missions is a hassle since you can't view the sector map when you're buying stuff for trading or browsing missions. I didn't have a PC back in '96, so maybe these types of annoyances were common for the era and genre, but I found them to make the game borderline unplayable. Buy and play it for some great 90s vibes, but it might be a better use of your time to just watch the "movie" on Youtube.

I put a lot of hours into this game back when my monitor was a hell of a lot heavier and loved nearly every second. Sadly, this port is just plain bad. Graphics flicker, speed up, slow down... it's so poorly optimised, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a shoddy pirate copy. This was a terrible shame for someone whose every previous GOG experience was plug-in-and-play heaven.