Arena Reviews versus BSG Reviews

ck9791

Rear Admiral
It seemed to me that Arena received mixed review from the different magazines and reviewers. While some were quiet positive, others seemed to continually jump on the fact that this wasn't like the WC games of past despite the fact that it was a 50MB X-box live download. Since that time, a Battlestar Galactica game similar to Arena has also been released on live and I was wondering how the reviewers saw the BSG game in comparison to Arena? Did they review it about the same? More or less favorably?
 
Good question, and a space point for you.

BSG recieved very little attention... reviews were roughly similar to Arena with one or two exceptions (it would be hard to justify otherwise - it's literally the same concept except with less of each aspect that Arena moffered...) Sadly, a lot of reviews wrote it off as being like Arena, with the suggestion that Arena wasn't good - and to that I say booo.
 
That was my understanding of BSG as well, while it had some sort of single player campaign, that the multiplayer aspect of the game had less than Arena. Fewer game modes, fewer ships..... I didn't know though if reviewers may have been talking the game up more because 1.) There is a BSG tv show on the air now, 2.) It has a single player campaign, and 3.) there are not a dozen or so past BSG games to compare the new x-box live game to and complain about how it doesn't use the same formula.

The reviews of Arena seemed to just get hung up on the fact that it wasn't the same as WC1 through Prophecy and based a lot of their complaints on that. The game being designed as an up to 16 player space combat game seemed to be secondary to them. The reviewers didn't look at Arena for what it was, they just looked at what it wasn't.
 
I saw several BSG reviews that pointed out that the Warthog BSG sim game from several years ago was superior.

I think BSG had a lot more to apologize for in this area, though - *unlike* Arena, BSG *was* initially announced as a space sim rather than a top-down action game.

(IGN and Gamespot seem to have rated it higher than Arena, though... and their reviews were done by different people. This is, presumably, because IGN and Gamespot are terrible.)
 
As an interesting counterpoint, I have the holiday issue of OXM waiting for me to scan it. The BSG review specifically mentions "the superior Wing Commander Arena." Note that they gave Arena one of the Higher scores of the lot, whereas the've rated BSG somewhere at the halfway point. (5.0 to be exact compared to arena's 8.5) Incidently, this also put Arena in their "the 360's best games" list also in the same issue, which basically lists every game that they've give an 8.0 and higher rating as a kind of gift buying guide.
 
Thats good to know, from the description i read on the BSG game, it came across as Arena "lite" to me.
 
Someday it'd be interesting to compare sales figures for the two. BSG certainly has a more popular name today, but for anyone with any knowledge of the games, it's clearly the inferior one.
 
BSG has slightly better graphics, but that's because it has half the content - making more room for larger textures. Other than that, though, the controls are only a shadow of Arena's and fairly boring all around.
 
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