Although I had played it when a friend lent it to me in high school I remebered almost nothing of the last third of the game. While there is a fair bit of pixel hunting (which actually forced me to use the walkthrough gently provided by GOG.com a couple of times) and the ending is a bit abrupt this game is even better than I remember, especially since back then I played the game without knowing of many of the books and fairy tales referenced in the game.
This game is FMV at its best, with good acting and not excessively linear, you can actually influence the morale of your wingmen with dialogue choices like a sort of RPG. The gameplay is a lot better than the first two Wing Commander games for the simple fact that now the spaceships are 3D models instead of sprites, eliminating the problems that affected WC 1 & 2 caused by the lack of a proper sense of perspective when flying near any ship bigger than a fighter. There are many other gameplay improvements: You can fly into a carrier's hangar and blow up its fighters before they can launch; the targeting computer now gives you an aim indicator when you lock a target; they implemented an energy management system, although it's not as intuitive and easy to use as in other (even older) spacesims; you can customize your loadout before entering the mission and even change ship in most missions and most of alla they ditched those annoying asteroid fields with random spawning, one of the most boring and frustrating features of the first two games. There are still a few issues however: sometimes the game engine doesn't register collisions with capital ships and you end up flying inside them (no, i'm not referring to the beforementioned hangar flying) and the planetary missions are a bit buggy, with buildings that disappear exactly when you are close enough to crash into them, and then there is the mission design that is only slightly less basic if compared to WC 1 and 2, with a lot of patrol, escort and search and destroy missions with very few twists. Overall I greatly enjoyed it, although the mere gameplay is not up to standard with games like Tie Fighter, it compensates with much flashier storytelling and the rpg elements, if you like spacesims this is a must buy. PS: Now waiting for wing Commanger IV on GOG... EDIT [which of course is on GOG now, this review is from when I finished the game for the first time and the fourth game wasn't available yet on GOG]
I played "SpaceSims" since I was eleven and had a 486DX 25Mhz, but I never had the chance of playing Wing Commander properly till a week or so ago when I bought this package on GOG.com (I did get the windows port of the first one from a magazine in the late 90s but it was insanely buggy on Windows 98 and refused to run after the first few times). The graphics for the time it came out were outstanding (much better than the monochromatic 3D models used in other similar games at the time) but unfortunately have a very bad influence on gameplay. The sprites used to render the ships work well enough for fighters and smaller crafts but are really impractical when it comes to asteroids and capital ships: The asteroids because they tend to pop up at a very short distance even while you can see supposedly smaller fighters much farther thus making dodging them a matter more of luck than ability simetimes; For the capital ships the problem is that you don't get a real sense of the distance you are from them when you are flying against them, making missions where you have to defend or (in Wing Commander II) bombard them frustrating because often you find yourself dead because you flew too close to them without noticing! A peculiarity of Wing Commander I and II compared to the more-or-less contemporary X-wing is the more arcade approach to combat: You don't get to manage your systems energy to compensate your fighter's faults so if you find yourself on a strike mission with a light fighter (it happens a couple of times) you cannot for instance trasfer your engine power to the shield when hammered down by an entire squadron of enemy interceptors. The gameplay remains essentially the same in both games although the second game shows a series of improvements in pacing (main guns are a bit more powerful so you can destroy less powerful enemy fighters more rapidly) and balance, in particular capital ships in the first game were ludicrously easy to kill once you eliminated their fighter escort, while in the second game you had to use torpedoes (which need a lock and take a veeery long time to get it) which can be carried only by certain fighters and need to be launched really close to the capital ship without evasive manouvers lest you lose the lock. There are also some problems with keyboard and mouse controls with the savegame menu in the second game which made me lose savegames several frustrating times, essentially when you clicked on save/load game with a mouse or by pressing enter the game instead of just loading the save/load menu loaded a game randomly, fortunately while using the Joystick to access the save/load menu I didn't have any particular issue. Another problem are the game crashes that happen in the second game sometimes during missions. You might also want to change the dosbox cycles to a higher or lower number if you feel the gameplay and animations go too slow or too fast for your taste because the games were made specifically for very old CPUs and don't handle well with anything faster. The good is essentially in how the story is told, your wingmen have a personality (even though in the first game they are often stereotyped way too much, even for an old school game) and you can have a chat with them between missions and in the non-linear campaign (there are two endings depending on how well you played) of the first game they can even die in combat and have a funeral cutscene with personalized dialogue from the CAG and the protagonist. The second game instead has a more cinematic approach with longer and more elaborate in-game cutscenes and although the campaign is a bit more linear the story is much better told and overall enjoyable even though it is not much more elaborate than the first. My advice is: if you aren't scared by the graphics (and the bugs of the second game) and you like spacesims this game is worth a try, prepare to die a lot (often in really frustrating ways, sometimes the only way to remain sane is using cheats) and at the same time enjoy one of the first experiments in implementing cinematic storytelling in an action game. The only thing that keeps me from giving four or five stars are the gameplay issues, otherwise I would have rated it a must buy. NOTE: edited for typos (nice noticing I typed a 3 instead of a 4 when mentioning the CPU of my first PC, though considering I had an uncommon downlocked 486 maybe a 386 would have been an improvement...) some added details and sentence clarity. Hooray for the higher character limit and being able to edit the reviews!
