StarLancer

"Tasty eye candy with no filling."

The first time I saw a preview of Starlancer, on BetaBites, I thought to myself, ''Man, that game looks sweeeet!''. That part was absolutely true. Too bad nothing in this game is as sweet.


Gameplay:
Well what can I say? Its exactly the same as the Wing Commander games, all missions are absolute killfests. Never mind you are on the losing side in a war. Never mind you have sub standard equipment. And most of all, never mind your wingmen are all volunteers with no experience. Your job is to go out there, and slaughter space-commies with extreme prejudice. And of course, since the power of Democracy is on your side, you never ever have to worry about anyone on your side dieing at all. Time'll fly right by seeing as nothing ever changes. Kill, retarget, repeat. The weak attempts at story telling and plot twists are extremely weak in the face of Freespace 2. Its also amazingly impossible to get killed, unless you accidently get hit by a anti-capship torpedo, and if you're not careful, this might actually happen very often, seeing as in almost every single mission one part of it involves chasing down torpedoes that look like they're left over from the first Soviet Union. You'd think by the time they invent gigantic space ships, they'd think of a better way to design weapons, instead of just making really really big masses of explosives and adding an engine to the back.

Story:
As I said before, weak. The new alliance of the US, UK, France, Italy, and Spain are signing a piece treaty with the Confed, basicly, a new Warsaw pact of countries, and being the good, trusting, naive guys that they are, the democratic guys get caught with their pants down as the Confed launches a sneak attack and decimates the French and Italian fleets. Thats where you come in. You are part of a volunteer squad, and you, of course, single handedly change the course of the war. While the story itself is cliched, I have to admit I do like the between mission news reports. They do add atmosphere and more explict details to the story, but I can't imagine why there would be galactic news reports during the biggest war in the solar system.

Audio:
The sound effects are very nice, lasers blast and missiles roar, its all good except for the sound of anti-capship torpedoes launching, which basicly sounds like a series of loud clicks.
The quality of the voice acting though, ranges from good (in the cutscenes and pre mission briefings), to downright crappy (in mission).

Video:
Can't complain about much here. This game is downright beautiful! Very nicely done textures, transparencies, etc. I especially like the ''shield bubble'' anim when you hit someone, though an indication of where on the shield I hit would have been nice. And when you destroy an enemy ship, the debris field it leaves looks equally great as the all other objects. The capship explosions are nice, they actually explode instead of Wing Commander: Prophecy's ''textures turning into a shade of murky grey/brown'' capship ''explosions''. But I really think it could still could have been improved. I really don't think every large object explodes starting from its rear, with an incremental series of small explosions along its body, blowing off the hull at regular lengths until the entire ship has been affected in this way.

Value:
I would not buy this thing. Borrow it maybe, just to marvel at how cool it looks, but buy, definitely not.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/08/00, Updated 07/08/00