I'm not a flight simulation expert and have only played a few flight games like this before. The genre sounded interesting so I decided to test the waters lately and have been pleasantly surprised so far. WC3 is spoken quite highly of and after playing through it, I would mostly have to agree. Gameplay: It's a 3D flight simulator in space. So obviously no gravity, but it doesn't apply realistic momentum physics (or whatever the technical term would be). If you throttle down to zero you come to a stop. You can turn and roll, but no reverse or vertical thrusters. And on some spacecraft you can perform a slide maneuver so you can pivot and continue firing on your target while you slide past to gain a trailing position. The tradeoff between durability and maneuverability isn't just on paper and really makes you weigh what ship you think you need versus how confident you are in your skills. The ships handle smoothly and feel very different depending on which one you're in. I used a flight stick and keyboard for controls, but it also supports mouse and joystick controls. I definitely recommend a flight stick or joystick, I know I wouldn't enjoy sliding a mouse around to track down these enemies. You operate from a base (usually your capital ship) in between missions. Here you can move between a few designated areas and chat with the crew, practice on the simulator, and save/load your game. The conversations will sometimes let you choose a response which can raise or lower the morale of that individual or the whole ship. This will affect how well they perform in missions. At first I was very interested in talking to the crew, but it does become a little monotonous after a while. Too many of the scenes are too short and just aren't interesting enough to feel like it's worth it. You lead the other pilots and usually get to choose who you want for your wingman. They do have slightly different abilities and will behave differently during missions. You can issue a few simple commands to them, which - depending on their morale level - they'll usually follow. Remembering to use your wingman to your full advantage could be the difference between winning and losing. Before most missions you can choose from a couple different ships, select what kind of missile loadout you want and away you go. You can then change your cockpit view or camera angle, adjust your ship power levels, select your active guns and missiles, among other things. I thought I would feel overwhelmed when I read how many options and controls there were, but I soon realized it wasn't that difficult to keep track of everything and there wasn't nearly as much to worry about as I initially thought. Most of the time you're focused on managing targets and straight up dogfighting. The missions have about as much variety as could be expected, but things do feel a little repetitive at times. Attack that, scout here, protect this, escort these, that's the majority of what you do. But usually the action is entertaining enough that you won't bored. The difficulty doesn't seem to always progress evenly. Some missions seem to be suddenly much more difficult, while I remember a couple later ones were surprisingly easy. You're almost always outnumbered which can be quite frustrating at times. There might be 8 enemies all seeming to bear down on you from different directions and there's nowhere to hide. Situations like this will force you to slow down, think about your available options and strategize. There were a handful of times I failed a mission and I didn't know why. The objectives had some very specific rules to follow to achieve success, but those steps weren't conveyed clearly during the mission or after I had failed. And there are some outcomes that are out of your control or feel nearly so that I didn't really care for. Graphics: This is from the early days of polygons, but I still think it looks pretty good. The ship designs are pretty cool, but the enemy ones are better. The larger capital ships suffer from larger surface with little detail, but they're easily distinguishable from each other. Explosions are nice and you can even see chunks come off ships as you shoot them. There is quite a bit of detail pop-in, especially on the large ships, but most of the time I didn't notice. Don't expect much variety from the backgrounds. It's mostly just a generic space setting, with some planets and other various outer space scenery scattered around. There are also a couple planet-based missions and these are the worst of all. The terrain texture is awful, the mountains look like big pyramids, and it's mostly just a solid brownish color. Full-motion video was trendy at the time and generally terrible, but they mostly bucked the trend here. Other than being an obvious green screen background, the environments are decent. Quality acting talent is used, the alien enemies are surprisingly good, but the video quality is pretty bad (at least in the version I played). It's really grainy and washed out which is a shame because some of the scenes would be pretty cool if they were higher quality. Audio: The music ranges from forgettable to fairly good. I don't recall anything getting on my nerves, even though you'll hear certain tracks many, many times. Some of it fits the mood quite well and will usually change to match positive and negative outcomes. A couple times I heard a slight similarity to some Star Wars tracks, but just briefly, it's not up to that level. Sound effects are mostly limited to laser blasts, explosions, and engine whines. It's all fine, but nothing too exciting. With the setup I used, I didn't really notice any positional audio for engine sounds or shots fired, but maybe that's not normal. If you can enable some 3D effects I think it would add a lot to the combat. Story: It helps to be familiar with the preceding games as they are part of the same thread and a couple significant plot points are carried over. It's not anything ground-breaking and I actually thought the story in the earlier games was a little better. Outside of a couple surprises, it's fairly predictable. Although you can end up on a losing path with no way to win if you're not careful. So I suggest you keep multiple save files at various points if you don't want to risk having to start over from scratch due to as little as 1 critically important mission failure. The cutscene dialogue is ok and is acted fairly well, but it's just not very interesting. There aren't very many scenes I would consider important to the main storyline. And other than the mission briefings you get a little backstory on the rest of the crew, but it's mostly uneventful and feels like pointless filler. Replayability: It mostly comes down to your enjoyment of the ship combat. The better you like it, the more you could replay this and still be entertained. You could choose a couple different conversation paths with your crew, but that doesn't offer much. There are some losing path missions you can purposely follow which could provide some fresh material as well. Verdict: If you like flight simulators or would like to try one, I definitely suggest Wing Commander III. You can tweak some settings and the difficulty to suit your skill level whether you're a pro or don't know a flight stick from a drumstick. The graphics and audio are just advanced enough and it runs smoothly so it's not painful to play. Drop a couple bucks and start downing some bad guys!
