I was enjoying this campaign until the Ladoga Karelia 41 mission. Unfortunately, the secondary objective for this mission is completely impossible to complete without cheating. The trucks you're supposed to stop make a bee-line for the exits from turn 1, and it is entirely impossible to even get close to all but one of them before they've left the map, nor is air power remotely sufficient to destroy them. Didn't they bother to test this mission before releasing it?
A nice idea, could have been great fun with a more forgiving implementation. Unfortunately, the designers for some reason decided to make this game punishingly, unremittingly difficult. It doesn't so much have a difficulty curve as a difficulty cliff - one the height of Olympus Mons. You will constantly run out of ammunition after about 10 seconds as the computer player generates unit after unit, attacking you constantly. Calling in an ammunition refill is fiddly and then it takes forever to arrive. You have to sit there for about 5 minutes waiting for it to sloooooooowly drop from the sky as wave after wave of enemy tanks charge all over the map attacking your base and your scavengers and you ALL AT THE SAME TIME! I don't know how any human player can possibly keep track of or respond to any of this. I finally gave up on it during the Venus missions. It's a real shame - I liked the idea, the setting, the basic interface, the graphics design and so on. I've given the game a score of three because of the imaginative setting and atmosphere - especially on the Moon and Mars, which look great. The whole game could have been great if the game designers had perhaps remembered that games are supposed to be fun, not a form of mental torture. I play to relax, and this is too hard to be relaxing. Yes, I'm aware the game has difficulty level options - don't be fooled - very easy isn't very easy at all. Maybe I am just doing something wrong, but the game gives you few clues about how to actually proceed. It just throws you in and expects you to somehow do everything right. A game should only be this unforgiving at the end, not in the early levels. Be warned then! I'm aware there are some players who enjoy this kind of high difficulty game - if so then this is definitely for you. If you are not, be aware that you probably will only enjoy the first few levels.
I came to this game fresh, buying the GOG release after reading a positive review in a 22 year old issue of PC Zone magazine by Charlie Brooker. The graphics are great, very surreal although I found myself wondering if there were missing textures - there are lots of flat polygons used with no texture mapping, I think its an artistic choice by the designers and once you get used to it, it works well as part of the game's unique character. The game's atmosphere is odd, the characters are odder, and the end reward for completing the game is some kind of French punk video. Conventional it ain't. The gameplay is fantastically easy to get into, ONCE you change the controls. My advice: use the mouse for turning - but disable the y-axis and use WASD for up down strafe left and right. Or some similar setup you're more used to for modern games. You have to use W,A for up and down and the cursor keys for left and right in the flying sections though, but that is easy enough. The game's plot I can't begin to explain, and it doesn't really matter. The game's structure is simple - move from area to area defeating the evil robots and with various other bits thrown in - platforming, snowboarding, sniping, simple puzzle solving of a sort. It keeps changing pace on you. The game is also quite short, finished in two evening sessions (on easy difficulty, admittedly), so this won't eat up a large amount of time. I certainly intend to play again though - it's great fun! Strongly recommended, particularly if you fancy something just a little bit different. Note: the default seems to be software mode, but there is a 3dfx mode - run the game with (or change the shortcut target to) MDK3DFX.exe in the game's installation directory. I had no problems on my Windows 10 machine running in this mode.
Had a lot of fun playing this: word of advice - don't play on the easiest setting, unless you just want to watch the video cutscenes. I played through on the second easiest - and still found it a challenge enough for to be satisfying to complete! The video sequences are great: especially love the Kilrathi costumes with the (animatronic?) heads. Mark Hamill, John-Rys Davis, Malcolm McDowell, Biff and the rest of the cast are also entertaining to watch. The games only real failing is the space combat sequences - which is the actual game part of the game. It takes a lot of getting used to - you WILL need to read the manual - and somehow it just doesn't feel as slick as, say, the X-Wing series. I should add that, unlike X-wing, I never played this series 'back in the day' so this was my first time coming at it in 2018. Still, once I got into it I enjoyed it a lot. Enough to play through till the end, but its the characters and the story in all its mid-90s FMV glory that kept me at it. Note: This game does work on Windows 10, but tends to freeze up for a second before each video sequence. This is a DOSBox problem, and its fixable. Fix it by going into the DOSBox config file and changing the output line to output=openglnb At least that worked for me.
