PC Gamer: Starlancer

Starlancer
The glitz, the glamour, the flashy graphics - Starlancer is pretty, it's oh so pretty, but not too bright.

As a big fan of the Wing Commander series, I was eager to see the famous Roberts brothers (that's Chris and Erin) first Digital Anvil release. Having just finished my review of Tachyon: The Fringe (which is a fine game), it's obvious that these two are gunning head-to-head for your space-combat gaming dollar.

Starlancer basically lays the groundwork for DA's upcoming epic space-faring combat adventure, Freelancer. Think of this as a prequel. It's the 22nd century, and the old problems of our time are still present. The Russians (now known as the Coalition) are still screwing things up for everyone, this time by deciding to conquer the solar system. It's up to the good guys (the Alliance of Americans, Germans, British, and Japanese) to stop them. The story is more or less a Cold War boiling over into a hot war in space. You play a new pilot for the 45th Volunteer squadron on the side of the Alliance.

First off, it's really easy for the graphical splendor evident in every element of Starlancer to win you over. If judged solely on flash, this game towers over NovaLogic's Tachyon. Capital ships are meticulously detailed, explosions leave behind debris that actually has momentum, and damaged fighters billow translucent smoke from their engines. The visual effect of cloaking your ship is one of the coolest I've ever seen (the entire cockpit ripples wildly and everything looks like its made out of rubber.)

Additionally, all the cut-scenes are first rate, as is now expected from the Roberts brothers. And to top it all off, all this fine detail clicks by at a very smooth framerate, even when the screen is filled with bogies. Basically, we haven't had a space shooter this pretty since Freespace 2.

So for graphical glitz alone, Starlancer will get its audience, but the visceral impact will be muted on the realization that there are just three basic missions formats: escort, destroying turrets, and shooting down torpedoes. That pales in comparison to some of the diversity evident in the less glamorous Tachyon. There are 25 missions in this game and all of them can be filed under one of those categories, or configurations of these three tasks. A typical late-stage mission requires you to take out enemy capitol ships by blowing up all the turrets and then escorting torpedo bombers in for their run.

Sure, ship escort is expected; we did it in TIE Fighter, we did it in Wing Commander, and we did it in Freespace, but at least we had other stuff to do, too. The mission design in Starlancer doesn't even come close to the genius behind some of the greatest levels in Tachyon and Freespace 2. There are times when you can see an inkling of inspiration, such as a level where you have to fly stolen enemy bombers into the middle of an enemy fleet and torpedo their flagship.

And there's also a mission where you find yourself accidentally warped into the middle of a huge enemy fleet and have to find a way to get back before being blown to pieces. But there simply isn't enough of that ingenuity. To compound the lack of originality, some of the missions are insanely difficult. One example is a sortie where you have to defend your carrier from torpedo attacks coming from every direction. The entire mission is spent zooming from one end of the ship to the other, blowing up incoming torps. The first time you attempt it, it's cool, but the by the fifth time, you're ready to throw your joystick out the window.

There was one mission that I played six times before I beat it. Maybe I had a bad day, maybe it was just bad luck, but for some reason, I kept failing, again and again. Now, I'm not new to this genre, and I'd like to think that I'm not a total putz, but there would be times when I'd fail missions and not even know what I did wrong. The difficulty could be forgiven if you were fighting opponents with challenging AI. Instead, it just attempts to overwhelm you with wing after wing after wing of bad guys, and just when you think you're done, another wing comes in.

Despite these frustrations, there are a lot of good things to be said about Starlancer. The production values are certainly top-notch, and the involving story does a good job of immersing you in the game world. You'll cringe every time you lose a ship because the other pilots will chastise you, and you'll be proud every time you complete an especially challenging mission. Even the hundreds of lines of in-game dialogue will help you through, despite much of it capitulating to stereotypical accents.

The sensation of motion is also very convincing, and the combat is fast and intense. This all makes the lack of creativity in the mission design that much more irritating. Starlancer is a very well-polished game with a good engine and a promising storyline; all it needed to become great was some inspired level design. This could very easily have been an Editors' Choice winner, but the repetitive gameplay and lack of inspiration drag it down to a more mediocre level. When it comes right down to it, I had much more fun playing through Tachyon.

- Li C. Kuo