finally my wing commander saga full review

Jdawg

Commodore
this will be a long read but I feel this game deserves it.

This is my final review for Wing Commander Saga The Darkest Dawn, this will include the Prologue and main campaign. My review will cover the story, character, gameplay, controls, and overall feelings on the game.

First off the thing this game nails is the controls and control setup. I used a 360 control pad and it worked perfectly and I mean perfectly, the binding of the buttons was seamless and never had one issue, coming off of wc4 where I constantly had deadzone problems it was such a pleasure to have a game control flawlessly. It was a pleasure getting behind an enemy, matching speed and lighting him up. It was also great targeting sub systems on cap ships and wearing them out as I did fly byes. the controls were an easy 10/10 for me.

In that same vein lets talk about overall gameplay. As a whole it was great, massive fleet action (which is always what I wanted in a wing commander game) and huge battles. Like I said in the control portion some of the best gameplay was when taking down cap ships by sub systems, it was so much fun. Now I do have some gripes with gameplay. like others have said some of the scripting is so obvious that its painful. Anybody who has ever played games will see some scripting signpost from a million klicks away lol. Also lets go ahead and get it out of the way the Kinny mission was god awful, that mission should have hit the cutting room floor, and either made into a cut scene or just cut, yes it is that bad to me. I really liked when the game went out on a limb and did something different, I just wished it did it more often. One of my fav missions was when you were in the nebula and you ran across a broken down friendly cap ship, its like the game went from a combat sim to a survival horror game, just the ambiance this mission created was great. I thought at any moment the cats would jump in, out of no where and sneak attack us. I think the game could have used some more of those tension and different missions. Also as I have stated in other threads I did think there were too many false endings to some missions, and some missions were just too long. But to me those are all small gripes and overall gameplay I give an 8/10.

Now as far as graphics and sound design go, I thought the game looked and sounded great, the ships all looked awesome especially the kalrathi cap ships. Likewise I loved the sound of the lasers and missiles and the sound of explosions. there was nothing more exciting to me than watching cap ships explode as close as possible and feel the shock wave lol. It looked amazing. Likewise the cut scenes looked great considering they were made on no budget. overall I give 9/10.

Lets talk about characters, this is where there seems to be a huge divide among the players of saga. It seems a lot of gamers did not like any of the characters and in fact found them unlikable. While I did not like every character or VA, I would say I liked 80 percent of them. Like I said in my other post I really loved Sweeny, honeybear, Assassin, Ninja, and greywolf. I understand why some didnt like Avatarr but he grew on me like a fungus, and I thought to myself if Maniac had a son it would be Avatarr. As I also stated while I like the character of Physcopath I hated his VA, he sounded like a guy pretending to be crazy instead of actually being insane. On the other hand I hated the character of MD but loved his VA, he should have played Physcopath and the MD character should have been cut. As far as the main character I liked sandman a lot, some of the writers gave him lines that were out of character to me, but it never took me out of the game for long at all. as far as some of the other dialogue and secondary characters they were both extremely hit or miss, the worst lines of the game is the you killed kenny line, or the part where the pilot called the transport driver a turd. Overall I give the characters and VA 8/10.

Finally the story of the game is what kept me hooked. I thought the Prologue was the perfect introduction to the game and to the wing commander universe again. It was just awesome and I think the Prologue had the best string of missions in the game. A game these days need to get me hooked early to keep my interest and this game did, it caught me hook, line and sinker. I loved the pacing of the story, it was like two heavyweights trading blows. the Cats got the best of us and then we would punch back and get the best of them. The game was dark and moody and just had a great vibe to me. overall I give it a 9.5/10

Finally some random thoughts they may drift from negative to positive. While I love the pacing of the overall story, the game could have used some editing and prob could have lost about 4 to 5 missions, to make a more balanced game. As I said before I loved the small cameos of hawk, panther, rollins, maniac, blair, and flint among others.The two missions where you go down to planets are some of my fav missions in the game. Overall I found the aces to be a let down and anti climatic, the one exception was stalker. Stalker was a fun mission even though it was a little buggy with him being able to ram you cloaked. In wc3 and wc4 i hated flying the bombers but in saga the longbows had some of my fav missions in any wing commander game, so kudos there. Overall this game reminded me why I love the series and thats about the biggest compliment I can give.

score
9/10. This game belongs in the wing commander cannon to me, its a great companion piece to WC3. I cant believe fans created this, its better than a lot of triple A games I have played.
 
quick question im now reading the book fleet action (and Im loving it) im just curious with wc3 and with wcs what is the timeline from the end of the fake cease fire, and the attack on earth, to blair dropping the bomb, is it less than a yr. Like how many months passed between sandmans first prologue mission to the end of the saga campaign. its seems like its between 6 to 12 months.
 
2669.267 is the day listed in Star*Soldier for the Temblor Raid on Kilrah. I don't have the exact date of the Battle of Earth in front of me but I'm pretty sure it was towards the end of 2668; IIRC there are some Srandoff cutscenes about the futility of celebrating Christmas/ New Years or some such. The date would put the Temblor Raid somewhere mid-year, around August or September somewhere. Say eight months between the events, guesstimating.
 
2669.267 is the day listed in Star*Soldier for the Temblor Raid on Kilrah. I don't have the exact date of the Battle of Earth in front of me but I'm pretty sure it was towards the end of 2668; IIRC there are some Srandoff cutscenes about the futility of celebrating Christmas/ New Years or some such. The date would put the Temblor Raid somewhere mid-year, around August or September somewhere. Say eight months between the events, guesstimating.

thats what I was guessing thank you. its just strange to think that the cats could have been right back on our front porch if blair failed to many times withing 8 months
 
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