Privateer 2: The Darkening

Let me get this straight, this got two starts from me only because with darkfix (see the GOG forums for more info) is more or less functional and the FMVs are full of great actors (the plot is also nice overall), the problems come when it comes to the basic game design of the thing. Even the FMVs though full of people like John Hurt, Christopher Walken, Cliwe Owen and BRIAN BLESSED have a weird audio mixing that makes dialogues often really difficult to understand if you aren't a native english speaker (no subtitles of course). With Darkfix I was also able to use the throttle axis of the stick which is always good for the hotas crowd out there (though you'll need to recalibrate it in the options every time you launch the game). But the worst part is the game design of the thing, where to start? From the fact that to move from a waypoint to another you have to kill every hostile ship but often said hostiles keep spawning? From the obnoxious sound effects and animations in the trade interface (fortunately they can be partly disabled) and how simplistic trade is compared to the first Privateer? Trading also requires to hire a ship, because you are confined to fighters as your personal ship goes. You will need to grind money through trading because the missions are often very inbalanced pitting you against insurmountable odds. There are a bunch of randomly triggered sidequests that can be rather amusing at times (they all have their FMVs) but some of them can be rather esoteric (I failed one without noticing). There is also the tendency of the game to send you mission updates during combat halting the game whether you want it or not which is quite disorienting (and also preceded by a grating beep sound). This is probably the first really bad spacesim I ever tried, not just a case of "not my cup of tea" but a really, really mediocre game, even with the crashes and a bunch of glitches fixed it's not really worth it unless you are fixated on spacesims like I am.

Personally I was a little disappointed by this title. It hasn't aged well. While it is great to see a young Clive Owen in action, particularly knowing the heights he was going to go on to reach, he is one of the few high points of this game. The cut scenes are very hard to watch on today's modern LCD/LED monitors, and I quickly found myself running this game in windows mode in order to make the cut scenes more watchable. This was my main problem, I am no expert with dos box and older games (while I am over 40, I never owned a PC until I was in my 30's). Due to this, I spent around two hours continuously entering and exiting the game, just tweaking the visuals in order to be able to play it. While the game didn't cost much, I (naively, possibly) thought I would at least get a game I could 'pick and up play,' which is not the case. Even now, despite my efforts to find the right '3D' format for my graphics card, I still get a lot of stuttering in the frame rate when the game get 'busy.' The most annoying aspect is that I cannot tweak things 'in game' mainly because this is a very lazy effort by someone who just 'dos boxed' the original game with no consideration for issues with modern systems. As far as the game play goes, I can see why there is no 'Privateer 3.' Frankly, cut scenes to one side (the only redeeming feature), this game sucks big time. Boring, one dimensional game play. A very cumbersome trading system, that could have been done much better, even back in its day. Endlessly repetitive combat, with the same four or five 'insults' (that become very annoying, very quickly) on a constant loop; the benefit of which, is that, you actually want to kill your opponent just to end to benign chatter. The missions are completely pointless, and usually require you to travel from one side of the galaxy to the other for no discernible reason than to 'explore' a featureless, boring universe. This game is total pants. Can I have money back please?

This is a really cool game. However this version is not acceptable as a paid product. GOG says that this game is win 8 compatible, but it is not. -in game video look terrible, to the point that one can not see what is happening, and the video is important to the plot of the game. -when a planet, enemy ship, etc is on screen, frame rate drops drastically. THis makes the game unplayable. I contacted support, and they sent a list of 5 different things to do to get the game to work. The next day; so while the support was fairly quick I did have to wait after purchasing the game to even try to fix it. Honestly I don't want to have to trouble shoot the game. I paid for this and if it says that it works on windows 8 then it should just work without me needing to learn computer programming. I am not a beta tester, nor do I work for GOG so if I pay for something I should not have to spend any number of hours to get it working on my system. I just want to pay for a game and then play it. I really dont want to fudge around with my OS, and other highly technical things to get it to work. I hope they improve this for the future, I really want to play the game, but I want to PLAY it, not fudge around with my computer's software trying to get it to work.

Well, I bought the game because I remember how much fun i had with the Privateer one. Sadly this game is such disappointment. As a sequel in terms of gameplay enhancements it adds just some tiny stuff like more ships, but cripples a lot more. You no longer can carry cargo on your ship, you have to hire cargo-ships. And you basically have to guess what products to buy and sell where. I thought that the plant info that is in system should at least give you some general idea about what should be profitable trade wise, but it's just full of some unimaginative trash. The missions are pretty annoying, especially those different than seeks and destroy - sometimes failing without reason upon arrival to the mission system. The scan-line cut scenes are just pure ugly and annoying. I wanted to skip the intro after like 10 seconds. And just how is it possible that this dos game has so pooor performance ?!? I mean it's not full-hd extreme setting, it's VGA, there should be absolutely NO REASON for the choppy frame rate when bigger objects come into view.

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.