I'll admit I bought this game for one reason and one reason only -- It reminded me of Origin's 'Wing Commander: Privateer', right down to the alien felines that hold a striking similarity to the Kilrathi. So you'll have to pardon me if everything I say is coloured by the comparison. I haven’t played any of the previous Smugglers games, so I came into this blind. You remember how I compared this to a 90s game? Well, the comparisons go deeper. There is little animation and not a heck of a lot of sound. The music is nice, but it seems to loop a lot. Long story short, the game feels like it escaped from the days of DOS of Win95. This is hardly a bad thing, just don't go into it expecting cutting edge presentation. The tutorial was nice for a newbie like me. It explains the most fundamental concepts of 'how', but not really 'why'. I would have thought a bit more of a starter campaign to help explain the different sides and backstory would have been nice. Long story short: If you liked classic games such as Elite and Privateer but don't want the real-time dogfighting, this might be for you. Side note: I was able to get this working under Linux/WINE 1.7.28 but had to set it to emulate a virtual desktop otherwise the stopped responding when the main play window appeared.
I wanted to love this game, I wanted to even just like it. But I couldn't. The big thing to know going into 'Privater 2: The Darkening' is all in the name. This isn't 'Wing Commander: Privater 2'. There's no Wing Commander in it at all. If you take the game as a stand alone product, with no relation to the Wing Commander series, it's okay at best. It's not a bad game, just unpolished and unfinished. The flight engine works, but it's too easy to get stuck behind a never ending stream of bad guys. And the enemy AI goes from 'Couldn't hit the planet earth if they were in the Grand Canyon' to 'You're dead within ten seconds of starting' way too fast. I'm openly biased against the game. I sunk hundreds of hours into the original Privateer and was expecting this to be more of the same. Instead we got something that doesn't even have Kilrathi. Privateer 1 was a masterpiece, Privateer 2 was an unfinished experiment, and Privateer 3 never got off the landing pad.
