Does that sound like a lot of story? You haven’t seen anything yet. Before each episode (which is further divided into missions) you start in your cabin on the carrier space ship. From here you have access to all sorts of dream analysis, records on Mirk, Guardian history, weapons, tactics, and other details. In fact the pre-game, new game, and in-game cut scenes also are heavy on the background and depth of the story. The story takes itself so seriously that I expected to find a very serious space combat simulator and was sadly disappointed when I discovered that the space combat game play has a simplistic arcade feel.

Once you have finished reading the novels in your cabin and reviewing the mission briefings you move to the hanger deck. This brings you to one of the strongest points of the game, ship customization. You can not only change your hull type, shields and weapons, but also use special device and, even better, design your own weapon systems. The ‘hanger chief’ will help you create weapons to the specifications you designate or you can take actual weapon components and string them together yourself to create custom devices. This is a tinkerers dream and you can spend substantial time in this screen changing your ship balance and creating new weapons.

The weapon creation is limited by what actual resources you have on hand. Fortunately, as the missions progress you receive additional components, and the hanger chief will disassemble three devices per day into their components for you.

Once your ship is customized to your liking you take off on the episode. Each episode is divided into missions. Once each mission in an episode is completed successfully you return to your carrier to start the next episode. Episodes are characterized by extensive in-flight chatter from your bizarrely named squadron mates. These dialogs will lay out specific mission objectives as well as pontificate on the good versus evil battle that you are taking part in. The flight controls are extremely difficult to master. The game is clearly designed to be played with a keyboard and mouse and most of the time you will have one hand on the WASD keys and the other on the mouse.

I attempted to play the game with a Microsoft Sidewinder Precision 2 joystick and found nothing but frustration using it. I could not configure the controls to take advantage of the extra buttons on my joystick nor could I use the twist feature on the joystick to roll my ship. The only joystick buttons that were useable were buttons 1 through 4 and the throttle. The actual control with the joystick was erratic and with all these problems I quickly went back to using a mouse and keyboard to play the game.

Speaking of frustrations, I suffered numerous crash bugs and lock ups on my primary machine, an Intel Core2 Duo system with 2 GB ram and an ATI X1800 video card. Often the screen would freeze and I could hear the mission continuing to take place, in fact, once I even succeeded on a mission while the screen was frozen when my wing mates managed to kill the last enemy fighter. Usually, though, a frozen screen was quickly followed by the sounds of an explosion and then silence as the game went to an invisible “You have died” screen. The only way out for me was to end the process using the Windows task manager.

Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Developer: Paradox Interactive
Release Date: 26.09.2008
Minimum System: n/a

Vehicle Type: Spaceship
Type: Action
Reality Factor: Science Fiction
Perspective: Third-Person
Extra: Other World
Combat Status: Militaristic
Age: Futuristic

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