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.
