I've played Starlancer seven or eight times through, and I can safely say that it is a fantastic game. Although it's nearly a decade old and there's a lot of difficulty in playing the game, there's something appealing about it all.
Starlancer throws you into the cockpit of an intersystem war between the Coalition (China, the Middle East and Russia) against the Alliance (The USA, Europe, Japan, Australia) right after a peace treaty goes butter-side-down as the Coalition wipes out Fort Kennedy (some big Alliance base apparently), wipes out the French and Italian Fleets (near enough...) and captures the inner four planets of the solar system.
You play as XYZ a rookie pilot and thrown into the 45th Volunteers, a group of international pilots who were enrolled after that attack.
Within the game you eventually become reknown, becoming the 45th Flying Tigers, and fly with a number of reknown squadrons such as the Pumas (Americans), the Vampires (Germans) and the Ronin (Japanese). On the other hand, you also fly against some of the Coalitions top pilots. Killing these guys in game helps to increase your rank, give you more ships and earn more medals.
Now, the major problem with Starlancer is that it has a very Wing Commander approach to game play; the mission's success relates to how well you can personally fly your bird, and if you're not very good at the game then early on there are missions that will result in you being killed for failing, thrown out of military service or just scolded. This is also poked harder in the ribs by the bully down the road because of the incredibly hard to steer ships and unless you can touch type then you'll find yourself looking at your keyboard as much as your screen to find out where a certain button is to change missiles or add to your shield/weapon/engine strength.
The second major problem, and although I'm sure some people might actually thank the game for it is the tutorial. While it does tell you everything you need to know and you can have practice blowing Coalition out of the skies it actually confuses the game play. I looked at the controls and said to myself "Fine by me" and jumped in, and although I struggled at the start, when I went back to playing the game a second time through I did the tutorials and I found myself checking the controls every three minutes to check which buttons I needed to check because the tutorial just wasn't useful to me. That's just a big iffy of mine, but I know that somewhere there are people who will struggle to play the game, and the tutorial is a good way of learning the controls quickly without having mission consequences.
Moving on to mission consequences in itself adds a new depth to the game. There was one mission that was impossible to complete unless you take three certain kind of missile to destroy three enemy gunboats, one of which pops up behind your torpedo bombers and starts blowing the living daylights out of them. Another mission, early on (around a third of the way through the game), requires you to defend drop pods on two seperate sides of the battle... space... field... thing. Your squadmates can't do much on their own and I found myself loosing half of the drop pods before going on to fight an enemy cruiser where you have to, in this order, take out all but THREE fighters (giving yourself some opportunity to do part two while your teammates attack said fighters), destroy the cruisers weaponry and then kill the remaining fighters, unless your squadmates became ept all of a sudden. Finally, more enemy fights jump in to say "Surprise" over your torpedo bombers. Finally, if you managed to do all that you still get reprimanded by your Wing Commander for not defending the drop pods well enough; doubly so if you failed to save some important guy on one of those drop pods.
Finally, there's no quick saving of any kind; if you want to redo something to get it right you have to do the whole mission over again.
That said, the missions are nicely varied. There's missions where you have to kill enemies, missions where you have to infiltrate, missions where you launch all out attacks and find yourself up crap street without a shovel, and missions where you find yourself defending yourselves, cargo ships, VIPS or damaged capital ships, and chasing down pirates. There's a lot of variety in the missions and while some of them are similar all of them are unique and have something that makes them fun in their own rights.
There's a variety of ships, by about two thirds through the game you should have unlocked them all. Don't be fooled by weapons or what anyone says (such as "is that a Wolverine he's flying?"), just because it has a lot of guns doesn't mean it's actually that good. Mostly because most fighters don't hit things, and since I play the game via keyboard (I personally can't stand the joystick controls), it makes things very hard to hit without ships having a special rule or somesuch called Target Lock. That's basically a cop out of having skill because provided you flash your crosshair near your opponent you'll be able to hit your enemy.
You can give voice commands to your squadmates, taunts to your enemy, but the taunts do little than add a little character to you as an otherwise speechless person, and the orders consist of "Attack him, leave him to me," the other commands I found having no effect or are a bunch of congratulatory or concern bits of dialogue.
There's also the news that gives insights into celebrities (from such squads as the Vampires) and sometimes your own actions. The news provides an extra layer of immersion for me and gave me a sense of achievement further than just "that was good/okay/bad" from your mission debriefing.
Mission briefing was also something I really liked. Sometimes your mission went to plan, sort of, others it went horribly wrong and you were "improvising". Mission debriefing was played out on a screan full of red and green representations of ships that looked like really bad 3D models, although I suppose that's all they need for it.
Overall Starlancer looks like a rather weak game but it is, in my opinion, possibly one of the best games I've ever played and not just because I enjoyed it, but also I got a lot of game play out of Starlancer and to me it's rather complete. It works and it's definitely a game that, if given the opportunity, you should rent it, and if you like it enough to play it again I'd buy it, although it'll take a good two days worth of playing to get through it all. I like it despite the few glaring problems it has, and you might like it as well.
Starlancer throws you into the cockpit of an intersystem war between the Coalition (China, the Middle East and Russia) against the Alliance (The USA, Europe, Japan, Australia) right after a peace treaty goes butter-side-down as the Coalition wipes out Fort Kennedy (some big Alliance base apparently), wipes out the French and Italian Fleets (near enough...) and captures the inner four planets of the solar system.
You play as XYZ a rookie pilot and thrown into the 45th Volunteers, a group of international pilots who were enrolled after that attack.
Within the game you eventually become reknown, becoming the 45th Flying Tigers, and fly with a number of reknown squadrons such as the Pumas (Americans), the Vampires (Germans) and the Ronin (Japanese). On the other hand, you also fly against some of the Coalitions top pilots. Killing these guys in game helps to increase your rank, give you more ships and earn more medals.
Now, the major problem with Starlancer is that it has a very Wing Commander approach to game play; the mission's success relates to how well you can personally fly your bird, and if you're not very good at the game then early on there are missions that will result in you being killed for failing, thrown out of military service or just scolded. This is also poked harder in the ribs by the bully down the road because of the incredibly hard to steer ships and unless you can touch type then you'll find yourself looking at your keyboard as much as your screen to find out where a certain button is to change missiles or add to your shield/weapon/engine strength.
The second major problem, and although I'm sure some people might actually thank the game for it is the tutorial. While it does tell you everything you need to know and you can have practice blowing Coalition out of the skies it actually confuses the game play. I looked at the controls and said to myself "Fine by me" and jumped in, and although I struggled at the start, when I went back to playing the game a second time through I did the tutorials and I found myself checking the controls every three minutes to check which buttons I needed to check because the tutorial just wasn't useful to me. That's just a big iffy of mine, but I know that somewhere there are people who will struggle to play the game, and the tutorial is a good way of learning the controls quickly without having mission consequences.
Moving on to mission consequences in itself adds a new depth to the game. There was one mission that was impossible to complete unless you take three certain kind of missile to destroy three enemy gunboats, one of which pops up behind your torpedo bombers and starts blowing the living daylights out of them. Another mission, early on (around a third of the way through the game), requires you to defend drop pods on two seperate sides of the battle... space... field... thing. Your squadmates can't do much on their own and I found myself loosing half of the drop pods before going on to fight an enemy cruiser where you have to, in this order, take out all but THREE fighters (giving yourself some opportunity to do part two while your teammates attack said fighters), destroy the cruisers weaponry and then kill the remaining fighters, unless your squadmates became ept all of a sudden. Finally, more enemy fights jump in to say "Surprise" over your torpedo bombers. Finally, if you managed to do all that you still get reprimanded by your Wing Commander for not defending the drop pods well enough; doubly so if you failed to save some important guy on one of those drop pods.
Finally, there's no quick saving of any kind; if you want to redo something to get it right you have to do the whole mission over again.
That said, the missions are nicely varied. There's missions where you have to kill enemies, missions where you have to infiltrate, missions where you launch all out attacks and find yourself up crap street without a shovel, and missions where you find yourself defending yourselves, cargo ships, VIPS or damaged capital ships, and chasing down pirates. There's a lot of variety in the missions and while some of them are similar all of them are unique and have something that makes them fun in their own rights.
There's a variety of ships, by about two thirds through the game you should have unlocked them all. Don't be fooled by weapons or what anyone says (such as "is that a Wolverine he's flying?"), just because it has a lot of guns doesn't mean it's actually that good. Mostly because most fighters don't hit things, and since I play the game via keyboard (I personally can't stand the joystick controls), it makes things very hard to hit without ships having a special rule or somesuch called Target Lock. That's basically a cop out of having skill because provided you flash your crosshair near your opponent you'll be able to hit your enemy.
You can give voice commands to your squadmates, taunts to your enemy, but the taunts do little than add a little character to you as an otherwise speechless person, and the orders consist of "Attack him, leave him to me," the other commands I found having no effect or are a bunch of congratulatory or concern bits of dialogue.
There's also the news that gives insights into celebrities (from such squads as the Vampires) and sometimes your own actions. The news provides an extra layer of immersion for me and gave me a sense of achievement further than just "that was good/okay/bad" from your mission debriefing.
Mission briefing was also something I really liked. Sometimes your mission went to plan, sort of, others it went horribly wrong and you were "improvising". Mission debriefing was played out on a screan full of red and green representations of ships that looked like really bad 3D models, although I suppose that's all they need for it.
Overall Starlancer looks like a rather weak game but it is, in my opinion, possibly one of the best games I've ever played and not just because I enjoyed it, but also I got a lot of game play out of Starlancer and to me it's rather complete. It works and it's definitely a game that, if given the opportunity, you should rent it, and if you like it enough to play it again I'd buy it, although it'll take a good two days worth of playing to get through it all. I like it despite the few glaring problems it has, and you might like it as well.
