User Reviews (1 - 11 of 19)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

Not the Wing Commander we fell in love with...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 15 / 21
Date: February 14, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Origin seems to be in the business of reinventing their trademark series that first gave them credit to the "We Create Worlds" slogan. However, in the process of making them 3D accelerator and masses-friendly Origin has also managed to undermine everything that had made the series great, namely its characters and compelling stories. Now this outing which puts closure on the WC series isn't nearly as bad as Ultima Ascension, but it's severely lacking nonetheless.

It makes sense to try to start anew with a fresh-faced protagonist who has yet to make the name for himself that previous legend Chris Blair forged in the last four games, especially with Mark Hamill entering his twilight years and whose heavy uniform pips and medals may alienate newcomers. That's all good. What's not all good is that the choice they made to take over the pilot's seat, Lt. Casey, has all the spine of a jellyfish and the verbal acuity of a junior high school wallflower at his first party. Even in the later half of the game when his piloting skills have started to beget him some respect from his peers, his attempts to affect the grizzled demeanor of a kid who had to grow up too fast and pull his own weight on deck is as laughable as his previously innocuous self. As for the rest of the cast, they even more annoying. All of the men act like egotistical frat boys, and all the women like snotty ice-queens. Even returning loose canon on deck Maniac looks unbelievably uncomfortable on-screen, and in the process hams up his role. You could care less about these superficial cardboard newcomers, in fact, the only relief comes from old comrades reprising roles and making cameos, namely Blair, Hawk, and even brief appearances of Admiral Wilfred and Col. Decker. Unfortunately, the former two end up dying during the game, leaving you to dogs of these petulant Gen-X-Wing jocks.

The plot is unapologetically formulaic: Evil aliens invade our space and its up to our heroes to thwart 'em. The missions cover familiar, if somewhat banal ground from previous WC installments along the escort/patrol/strike variety, though not nearly as innovative as the ones from WC IV. The new alien foes are fearsome enough in their sleek and reptilian splendor, actually bearing an uncanny resemblance to species 8479 from Star Trek: Voyager, but they are given no context. By contrast, they have none of the culture or history of the Kilrathi that was so captivating, even delivering a renegade in your midst in WC II, Hobbes. You really learn nothing about the alien race in Prophecy or the purpose of their invasion, merely some pseudo-theological drivel about they being the harbingers of a space-age apocalypse, but the premise falls flat. One gets the impression that they really exist to merely show off the new ship models. You'll find the one-sided design of the plot to be an enormous step backward from the complex conspiracies woven in WC 4's civil war.

The game ends on one of those portentous sci-fi sequel-promising notes ("They'll be back, y'know"). Except Origin is no longer creating straight-forward single-player epics, so one is forced to ask exactly what was the point of breaking all this supposed new ground if nothing is going to be done to evolve it and its new cast beyond their rote and insipid beginnings. Then again, since Origin seems to have been unable to churn a decent game since 1996, maybe that's not such a bad thing. Sure, the engine looks gorgeous, and all of the fighters and cap ships have undergone complete cosmetic changes, but all the eye-candy in the world can't cover up the lack of a compelling plot or characters, qualities that made the series endure eight years. In summation, the discriminating space sim gamer is better of with Descent: Freespace II, X: Beyond the Frontier, or hell, wait a few months for Chris Roberts of Digital Anvil to release Starlancer, he being the pre-Prophecy WC man who really knew what it was about.

One of the best space sims ever created

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 10
Date: November 23, 1999
Author: Amazon User

being an experienced player of flight and space sims, i must say that this is by far the best space sim released yet. i say yet because who knows what the future will bring. this sim has it all 360 degree rotation, realistic control and turning capabilities, ever increasing challenge as you go through the game. and to the reviewer who said there was a glitch i suggest that you mess with your settings because i did not and still do not have that problem. thank you, i hope you agree with me that this game kicks a**.

This was my first Space sim, and I wasn't disappointed

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 9 / 12
Date: November 13, 1999
Author: Amazon User

With the Mechwarrior games being my only Simulation experience, I bought this one mainly for the cool pictures on the box. For once, they did justice to the frosty disc within. Playing Lt. Casey, you fly missions against a strange invading foe, intent on extinguishing all life they find. Spanning three discs, I lost count of the missions I flew. I was so involved, I actually jumped when I was blown up! I've never played a game that left me shaking afterwards...this one grabs you by the neck, wrings you out, and leaves you exhausted but wanting more. Keeping it from 5 stars is a small glitch that makes the mouse pointer travel across the screen by itself, making menu items difficult to choose at times. A small flaw indeed, but an annoying one.

Acceptable Plot; Awesome Gameplay, Graphics and Sound

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: February 02, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Just to let all you Wing Commander fans that even though I have never played Wing Commander's 1-4, a great plot is something I always look for in a game (I play a lot of RPG's). So yes, I would have to state for you all that the story was certainly not one of the greatest I have ever come across, but there certainly was a plot to this game. Well, a story anyway. However, I got this game because I wanted a good space sim, and CGW rated this one the highest.

The graphics, although not top of the line today, were superb when the game was released, and its graphics still work today, for they are full of imagination and feature a solid frame rate. The alien ships were incredibly well designed, and the enemy ship textures have cool, glowing, almost glossy textures. Makes the Kilrathi fighters (who you will see) look obsolete. I loved how this game didn't use just sprites for fighters like some other games I have played. Also, I love how the closer you are to an exploding target, the more you shake from the impact of its explosion.

Also, the gameplay is pretty much the same as NOW! That's right, I don't think a single space sim has actually played noticeably better than this. The control is tight, and unlike X-Wing, you can go diagonal. You can also taunt your enemies, and if the enemy you are taunting has a live alien pilot, he will usually move to attack you. This is good when his original target is pleading for help, and you won't fight any non-live pilots until later disc 2. I also loved how some enemy fighters are whole, and after you destroy the whole, they split up into three or six additional fighters. This adds a new fun level to the game as you fight a type of opponent that has never been conceived before.

Lastly, the sound is awesome, and must be listened to loud or, at least with good base. The pilots' voices are well acted (more than the pleading cruisers you're supposed to save), the sound effects are cool, especially the boom, and the music is incredible. I would, if I could turn the music volume up to max and keep the sound effects to a lower level, for the music doesn't rattle any non-awesome speakers.

The plot, while not overly amazing, does feature some good moments and the background storyline is very epic. I loved how in the future, not just any prophecy comes true, but the prophecy of the aliens who for the past two decades was locked in total war with humanity. Simply put, the destruction of the Kilrathi home planet proved to their gods that they were not worthy of living, and so their gods began a process called "Kn'athrak" (I might not have spelled it right). This "Kn'athrak" is the brutal process of elimination of the Kilrathi, their defeaters, and all life in existence. Needless to say, this is a very bad thing to humanity, who are now more armed then ever before (it's 2681 already!) to fight the incoming menaces (a bug like species).

This game is short, and the cutscenes are really just character development OR plot. I did really like the characters, but they didn't fit into the plot except for a select few. I also didn't like how I wasn't gonna figure out who the bugs were until Wing Commander: Prophecy II, which is a project that was cancelled because Origin decided to from now on only make online games (like the Ultima Online disaster, Origin?!). It's sad, but, as long as I have this game, the future of alien menaces better watch out, for I have killed so many of you already!

A Stunning & Epic Story Wrapped In A Great Game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: May 31, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Wing Commander: Prophecy is without a doubt one of my all-time personal favorite games for the PC. Aside from the fact that it gracefully and heroically retires Christopher Blair (Mark Hammil) from the series, the game is an expertly crafted piece of entertaining with only a few (stylistic) flaws. It also improves greatly over Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom by making combat missions longer than the video cut scenes, something that dogged its predecessor greatly. Prophecy has such eerie underpinnings that work together with the game and live action cinematics to make for an awesome story. It is also the start of a new generation.

After the defeat of the Kilrathi by Blair in Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, the Confederation finally has peace with regards to their once feline adversaries and the Cult of Sivar. But there in lies the crux of the matter for an ages old Kilrathi prophecy points to a time when darkness will descend upon the universe and the Kilrathi will die, bathed in their own blood and their once mighty claws no match for the coming evil, a time that they call Kn'Thrak, (A translation that means either `darkness' or `evil'). And it all begins with the destruction of a Confederation survey ship analyzing the destroyed Kilrathi homeworld in the Kilrah System by an unknown race.

There Shall Come A time

When one who has the heart of a Kilrathi,

but is not Kilrathi born, shall rain

cleansing fire down upon us,

and Kn'Thrak, a time of great darkness,

shall embrace us.

We are then taken to the TCS Midway, a gargantuan super carrier that will be the focus of the game and your home base for the duration. It is truly a magnificent ship and about the same size as Darth Vader's Super Star Destroyer-about 8,000 meters in length. It acts as a mobile base for the Terran Confederation and designed to be the center piece of a larger armada. It is here that we meet Lance Casey-your character-who is fresh from the academy and son of a famous TCN pilot. We also meet up with old Wing Commander alumnus-Maniac (Tom Wilson) who takes every opportunity to belittle Casey until getting his comeuppance in the worst way and by numerous members of the Midway's crew.

Basically it's your job to figure out just who these new aliens are and what they want. What they apparently want is to slaughter everyone and everything they come across, which is great because that's why you're here! There are heaps of missions here and they are all a great deal of fun. Missions range from standard Combat Air Patrols (CAPs), to seeking out and destroying capital ships, taking down freighters and search and rescue missions. One of the most memorable moments of the game is a missile launch, especially the Swarms, which leave twisting contrails as they streak off towards their targets. Origin really did a fine job on the new fighter designs-they no longer have the blocky, slab-like look that Price of Freedom had, but instead have a more graceful, rounded look. Most of these ships are also a joy to fly, conveying a great sense of speed and maneuverability, though less so with bombers like the Devastator.

Sid Mead (of 2010 & Blade Runner fame) was hired on to design the alien Nephilim/Phylum fighters and capital ships, and produces true wonders! The fighters have a beautiful aquatic-insectile look to them while the capital class starships resemble nothing most people have ever seen. They are both fearsome and invoke no small amount of curiosity from the player and made me want to find out more about this dark and enigmatic race.

Mission designs seems to have been a priority at Origin, because they are expertly crafted and bear much resemblance to Freespace 2, and lack the time-sensitive nature that plagued many of the X-Wing & TIE Fighter missions from LucasArts. I also retract my title comment in my Freespace 2 review-Wing Commander: Prophecy is as good a game. The missions take priority over the cut scenes, the post flight ones become annoyingly repetitive, as there are only 2 or 3 to see and you see them often. Beyond that this is Origin's swan song as there doesn't seem to be any movement from them to sequel it beyond Secret Ops which only adds new missions, good as they are. This is a fantastic game-it both looks and plays great while possessing a solid and engrossing story. Superb!

NICE

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: April 25, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This is one of the best space simulation games I have ever played. I had borrowed this game from a friend, beat it, then bought it when I got my next paycheck. This game has incredible replay value, which is a must when I buy video games. If you fail a mission, it's not like other games where you have to redo the mission to go further in the game, instead the story goes right along and you do a mission you wouldn't have done if you didn't screw your last mission. And this is perfect for expert and newbie gamers alike. One of the best things are that there is no need for cheat codes, you can turn invincibility on or off whenever and wherever in the game, as well as change the difficulty at anytime in the game. It even has a mission database so if you are on mission 15 and your want to go back and redo a failed mission, its totally workable. A gave this game 5 stars because I have had this game for 4 years, and I still find different missions to do.

A sad ending to a great franchise...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: September 05, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Wing Commander Prophecy is the last in the line of this epic gaming series. Much like other epics such as Beowulf, and Star Trek, Prophecy does well in ending the Wing Commander saga plot wise, so that Chris Roberts (The games creator) can go on to make a movie on the first three games of the franchise. Prophecy does feature returning players in Mark Hamill (Star Wars, Time Runner), Tom Wilson (Back To the Future), and Ginger Allen (Formerly dated Charlie Sheen), but only Wilson gets significant video time in this poorly acted sequel.

The game picks up where WC IV kind of left off, in that the Confederation is at peace. Unlike WC IV where the missions and characters slowly lead you into the plot mission after mission, WC IV leads you right in on the first mission. From there on out the plot of the game becomes more and more like an episode of Fear Factor, in that just when you think the guys you are fighting are bad enough the movie in the game goes out and makes them even worse. This is a horrible plot device consider the insectoid like bad guys that you fight are fairly easy to kill, in large numbers at that as well. The game's plot continues to dry up even more in the games attempt to bring an end to the adventures in the WC universe. Most of WC's best plotlines from Wing Commander 2 and Wing Commander 3 were all tied up at the end of Wing Commander IV, on top of that most of the characters who made those plots work got killed off in WC IV, so you can basically throw out the window any chance that this game is going to involve anything more than a bunch of guys sitting in the Rec. Room talking about how many bugs they are going to squash on the next mission. Mark Hamill's Blair character was at his best when Blair was in constant clash with his adversary Admiral Tolwyn, but with Tolwyn gone in this game Blair becomes a lifeless stone trapped into being nothing short of a character that offers advice to other troubled characters in the game (better known as Wilson from Home Imporvement syndrome). Blair does this once in disk one, and then dissappears for disk2, afterwhich he eventually reappears in disk3 and does it again. More importantly the other characters in the game are poorly developed, there are only a handful of situations in the game where characters open up to you, after which they ususally just dissappear into the purgatory of being your "friend" and never to talk to you for the rest of the game. If you know the ending's to Beowulf and Star Trek Generations you can pretty much guess what ends up happening to Blair (who you played as for the first 4 games) at the end of this one, serving as the climax to this poor plot. The ending in itself is a big let down, and the movie within the game fails to really tie up all the loose ends of the Wing Commander universe gamers have come to love.

Gameplay is the only reason why I gave this thing an extra star than I had intended, simply put the game follows the tradition of the WC flying engine. That is pretty much where it ends as the WC engine is hurt mainly by a pathetic race of aliens who appear in large numbers and really just play to shoot you and get shot at the same time. The AI for this game really misses the point of playing a WC game which is to out-manuver your opposition much like WC's III & IV where flying skills were needed heavily in order to come even close to defeating the enemy. This game focuses more on the shooting aspect of everything which kind of shows that for the most part space combat has taken a step backwards on the evolution scale.

More insulting are the ships that you pilot, the vampire, tigershark and destroyer are all loaded with somewhat useless ordinance, and when you fly bombers (Much unlike III) you are very limited in being able to fly against any non-cap ship. Also if you have played IV you would have realized the enormous technological step backwards the Confederation has taken for being essentially a few years ahead of what happened in 4. In 4 you got cloaking devices, flash paks, and 2 torpedoes on a ship that can travel faster than any ship in Prophecy along with much better guns an Auto Aim type system and you even got to choose what ship you flew along with what ordinance you carried. In prophecy all of those options are gone along with those ships which were basically used in two guys versus the world type missions. More importantly WC IV allowed you to choose your wingman an important feature missing completely from this game. Prophecy does have one good point though in the invention of ship-to-turret missiles, unforunately they are only on 1 ship and I think you only get 6 of them for ships that have many more turrets than that. The poor gameplay continues as you are no longer able to make the Morale changing choices in between conversations. In WC III & IV this was a great part of the game where if you chose to be a jerk to everyone on board the crew responded by not listening to the orders you gave them and more importantly their fighting became substantially weaker as you kept berating them through the game. It also added flavor to the character of Blair as well as with those who he interacted with making you actually care about the characters, and not just viewing them as faceless pilots saying the same things over and over again.

To be precise, don't buy this game unless you are that desperate to find out what ends up happening in the WC universe in this last installment of the WC gaming series. It amazes me how easily Chris Roberts betrayed Wing Commander by selling it off to FOX to make a crummy movie that nobody ended up watching. Wing Commander deserved better, and with the release of this game for the Game Boy Advance, hopefully its success will relaunch WC & Origin to do it better one last time.

Impressive, but it just ain't Wing Commander...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: August 13, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Wing Commander: Prophecy is a pretty damned impressive game; the ships are cool, the gameplay is great and the visuals are stunning. However, it seems to be missing something, especially compared with probably the best game of the series - Wing Commander IV, The Price of Freedom. The cutscenes are uninspired, despite the return of favourites Mark Hamill and Tom Wilson as Blair and Maniac; the other actors seem to be either grappling with the at-times cliched script or just not really doing a good job. The plot is... well, it doesn't seem to be anything we haven't seen before, and the mysterious aliens eventually turn into insectoid Kilrathi, with the usual curses across the ship-to-ship radio.

I admit, I was more into the Wimg Commander series for the cutscenes, although they were always supported by decent gameplay; space combat fans might get more out of this game than me. But I think people who got into Wing Commander for its blend of space combat and story will be somewhat disappointed.

A Fantastic Sci-Fi Space simulation Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: March 21, 2000
Author: Amazon User

The new graphics and sounds make this game a true masterpiece, although it is not the best in the Wing Commander serie it's still better than any other sci-fi simulation game ever.

Great Game , Cheesy Story

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: May 04, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Excelent graphics and a huge improvement over WC4.Its a challenge for all levels of space jocks. It is Overall a very enjoyable game, with the best 3D flight sim engine I have ever seen, dispite not being very hardware intensive. The cutscenes are a bit on the shallow side, but the gameplay really makes up for it.

Review Page: 1 2 Next 

Actions