Wing Commander™ 4: The Price of Freedom

The DVD-quality cutscenes might look pixelated by today's standards but look a whole lot better than the heavily-compressed quality of the day. The acting is superb and at times you just want to plow through missions just to get to the next cutscene. The planet-based missions look better than WC3 owing to texture-mapped ground but otherwise graphics are virtually identical to WC3 (except space is finally black instead of dark blue, and the cockpit view has completely omitted) Unfortunately, the actual gameplay is the biggest weakness as it has not aged well. Much like WC3 before it, the controls never were that great - keyboard control is very imprecise, mouse control is improved but also hard to make small, precise movements during dogfighting. This game always demanded a joystick but modern joysticks are far more sensitive than the joysticks of the 90's. If using a modern joystick or gamepad, you'll need to bump up the controller's central dead-zone, otherwise the ships tend to drift without seemingly any user input. Even once you've tweaked the controls, they still feel somewhat imprecise and you'll find yourself dying pretty quickly/failing missions. The standard difficulty setting is brutal - best off dropping it down to the easiest setting to avoid getting frustrated early-on. Even with this in mind, its worth checking out for a few bucks when the game is on sale for the sake of the quality FMV, but I feel that only older players will be able to put up with the badly-aged game mechanics.

This game could easily be the best in the series were it not for one thing: missiles. The story with its cutscenes is so good I found myself simply wanting to get on with the story instead of enduring the devilishly-punishing gameplay on anything higher than the lowest difficulty. Big-name actors with good-quality sets bring characters to life whom you can quickly care about, even if it is slightly cheesy at times. But I could never recommend the gameplay to your average person because it fails one crucial test: it does not feel fair. I'm no ace, but I managed to beat WC1 just fine and most of WC2. WC3 was a blast most of the way on the default "Ace" difficulty, with only a few long missions I lost patience on and used a lower difficulty level or invincibility for a moment. This time, I found myself replaying the THIRD mission so many times I went down to the lowest difficulty and only increased it to "Veteran" on missions without heavy fighter combat. The reason for this terrible dive in ability? Almost entirely the fact that missiles are a one-hit-kill on nigh anything, and they get used CONSTANTLY. In great contrast to previous titles, you can be in the most heavily-armoured craft in the game and still be killed by a single missile--sometimes so fast that you could not reasonably react. This goes for wingmen too. In WC3 you could generally leave your wingman to do their own thing and have them dance around their enemies for a while even if heavily outnumbered, but in this one you will regularly see the Confederation's best heroes shot out of the sky like nothing. On the lowest difficulty no enemies will use missiles, but unfortunately it also makes their craft crumple like paper, gives you auto-aim, and has them all fly stupidly in straight lines. To add to this pain, a few of the missions felt very cheap, and I encountered a few frustrating bugs that should have been obvious problems to the devs. But all that aside, it's WC3 goodness with better cutscenes.

Note: I'm an hard reviewer, barely a game has more than 3 stars. I only rate it after I finish it. I didn't play yet WC5, but WC is the best one I've played. Let's start talking about the good. The history is epic, I felt thrilled in the mid-end part of the game, it got me addicted. I really loved or hated the characters. Other good point: finally there is joystick Z-axis & trottle support, the movies are very good, and the missions varied. The game has a very good difficulty level, the enemy isn't easy to target. Still, I only recommend this game to those people that love space SHOOTERS (not sims), have a joystick and a good english level, with some frustration-shields, and cannot find more shooters in the marketplace :) Because (the bad): the joystick cannot be configured or profiled (no xpadder / pinnacle), and the most keys arent mapped. So if you want to change missiles, or release a decoy (you have around a second to do it before a missile impacts you) you have to move your hand from the trottle to the keyboard. What I did here was playing without the trottle, a real pity. Also, you may accidentally decrease your speed or fire a missile if you're afterburning with the JOY BUTTON 2 and you want to pitch or fire your guns. It persists bad ideas from WC3: the enemy attacks you 90% of time instead your wings, and when they talk (and this is frecuent) you cannot use your rear cam or your shield hud. The battles aren't 1 vs 28 like WC3, this time is just 1 vs 12-16, which is much better. No wide screen for flights, no movies subtittles (I had to play with my iPhone close with the transcriptions, because you cannot alt+tab). The energy management is awful, and everytime there is a cutscene (when you're moving to a planet surface), it gets resetted, so you have to adjust it again... quickly, and that's very hard. There is no enough sound volume balance options. In my PC, win 8.1, the movies were almost silent compared with the flights, annoying.

luckily GOG offers both the original MS-DOS version and the Windows DVD version and while the DVD version obviously looks better with much nicer FMVs, the lack of customisability is a huge detriment to the game. the MS-DOS version is easily playable in windowed mode (through DosBOX config) and if you play with a joystick with more than two buttons you can use DosBOX's keymapper to remap your spare joystick buttons. you can't do that with the DVD version as far as i know. i could live without the windowed mode (barely), but not being able to remap those joystick buttons which forces you to rely on keyboard commands for a wide variety of tasks is a no no for me. anyways, the game and story is really nice, it's Wing Commander at it's finest, just if you can't get into the DVD version due to the controls or lack of widowed mode, just try the MS-DOS version.

The FMV are better, the gameplay is better and the story is much more interesting. There is still the classic B-movie vibe from 90s FMV games but it works nonetheless. The mission design is more integrated witht he story bits and less repetitive. If Wing Commander 3 was the prototype this game is the pinnacle that the sequel doesn't have hope to match. You'll still probably get a bit more from the plot if you played the first three games but it can stand on its own and I think it plays better.