AND THE PIXELS KEEP ROARING
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Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi starts off with a shocker
in the opening cinematic. The Tiger's Claw - the Terran spaceship you served
aboard in the first game - gets blown to smithereens by Kilrathi stealth
fighters. The entire crew dies. Luckily, as it happens you are out on a patrol, but that
only results in you getting blamed and court-martialled for treason.
It appears that your feline enemy flew right through the patrol route you were supposed to cover. No
one believes your testimony that the Kilrathi has developed stealth
technology, but you are nonetheless cleared due to lack of evidence. Disgraced and demoted to captain, you are sent to some backwater system to rot for the rest of your career...
This opening sequence clearly foreshadows the increasingly cinematic future for this ongoing war saga. Gone is the first game's sense of taking an active part in a dynamic do-or-die
war effort. It's replaced by a predetermined and melodramatic story. Some cutscenes are now fully voiced, but due to the age of the
game, the acting and recording quality is poor. And while I enjoy the overall
story arc, the quality of the writing varies wildly. But in the end, the fun and challenging gameplay covers most expenses.
As the game starts, ten years have passed since the destruction of the Tiger's
Claw. You endure the humdrum routines of everyday on a space station far
from the front. But one day, during a regular patrol, you and your wingman encounter
Kilrathi opposition out of the blue. Since you're deep into Terran space, this is a strange
and ominous turn of events.
Soon thereafter, a Terran ship in the vicinity sends out a distress call,
claiming they're under attack by Kilrathi forces. You and your wingman get assigned to help them out. And slowly but surely you
once again get entangled in the war, searching for an enemy home base deep
within the Enigma sector. At long last, you get a shot at redemption.
You end up serving on this new spaceship, the Concordia, alongside some
old war buddies like Spirit, Angel and, eventually, Paladin. They welcome you with open arms. A few new faces also introduce themselves, but they make it clear they don't appreciate a "traitor"
in their midst. That word gets thrown around a lot, which is cause for
unintentional comedy, as it is a touchy subject for the protagonist. He gets surlier by the day and snaps
at every displeasing order, comment or sideways glance. And he's never late to point out his own flying skills. In the end, he comes
across as a douchebag and a braggart.
Wing Commander II focuses more on its space opera. In-mission cutscenes are a
welcome new feature. They interrupt the action to change the premise of the
mission itself. Your wingman might have to eject, forcing you to fly solo for
the remainder of the mission. Or you might get a call from home base with
updated orders, for instance to rendezvous with a damaged transport freighter
and escort it back home safely.
The presentation is a product of its time. To appreciate it, it takes viewing the game through a historian's lens. Instead of the usual, primitive low-polygonal 3D models of the time,
all ships are represented by sprites. They look better in screenshots, but it's hard to determine exactly what direction they're flying. The ship ahead of you might be veering slightly side-to-side to shake you off, but is depicted as the same, rear-end sprite all the same. And the closer you get, the bigger the pixels get. It's like
mosaic; if you get too close, they lose all meaning and become only pixels.
As for the dynamic soundtrack, it serves a gameplay function. It's an indicator of
when to relax, or when to brace yourself for combat. After clearing all your
objectives, a celebratory tune accompanies your return to base, whereas the
same song is played in minor key if you failed something along the way. The
dynamic tonal shifts were revolutionary at the time. Now I hardly register they exist.
The gameplay itself is more of the same old, streamlined space simulator.
Being released just one year after the predecessor, very little has changed. A
flight stick is still the superior control method, but any gamepad with an
analogue stick will do. Mission structures remain mostly intact with scout patrols, escort missions and bombing runs at the core. It all
takes place within the same old engine, and contains some new ship designs, a
few added weapons and minor features like a tractor beam for retrieval
missions.
"New releases" of Wing Commander II are played through a DOS emulator. This is great in getting the game to run at all. But it doesn't keep the framerate from being all over the place, constantly changing
with the number of sprites displayed simultaneously on-screen. Constantly altering the emulator's CPU cycle to slower and faster settings is the only way to fix this. And needless to say, this rips you out of the heat of the moment.
Luckily, this is only really a problem in asteroid fields or against a great
cluster of enemies. At least asteroid combat is a very rare feature - I think it only happens twice throughout the game, and I managed to avoid one of them entirely. Overall, the mission design is better this time around; more varied, challenging
and better integrated into the story. Some of the assignments can be interpreted
almost as boss encounters, and they are deadly. The hardest ones I had to retry at least a dozen times.
The enemy A.I. has received a boost, with enemy behavior being harder to predict. They sometimes co-operate to bait you and blast you from behind. Allegedly, the
A.I. changes depending on your performance, but if that's true it happens
"behind the scenes". That being said, it's hardly flawless. Neither friend nor foe care about what lies
between themselves and their target. If you're in the line of fire, your
wingman just might blow you up to get at the enemy (but in all fairness, the same goes when the
roles are reversed).
The most apparent changes take place within the narrative, with the complex mission
tree from the first game being trimmed down to a less intricate one. Your
performances no longer alter the war progression. It can, however, alter the difficulty of missions down the line. If you fail to blow up a transport in one mission, you might encounter more ships in the next one.
The game is also much more forgiving. When your co-pilots get shot down - and this happens a lot - they always eject instead of
dying, and the search-and-rescue crew always gets them back safely. (The Terran forces must have a big surplus of fighter ships). A few character deaths still happen, but they are entirely scripted and always unavoidable.
The soap-opera dialogue is amusing, and some character moments are quite
strong. But in other instances they walk the tightrope between funny and just
plain dumb. The Spirit and Angel plotlines are the strongest, with great
emotional payoffs towards the end. Paladin's story just kinda fizzles out
before the end. Stingray is a hilariously antagonistic bloke. The
rest are basically padding. All in all, I can accept the crew for what it strives to
be, which is entertainment and nothing more.
However, a fatally weak moment occurs near the very end of the game. Quite soon
after you transfer to the Concordia, it becomes apparent there's a traitor
among the pilots, working for the enemy. Who could it be? Well, if you've got
a sense of the economics of narrative design, you should be able to figure it
out long before the big reveal at the end. And when that moment finally arrives,
the explanation for the treason ranks among the worst plot twists I've
ever seen. It makes absolutely no sense.
And as much as I like the effort, the paranoia and distrust is strangely underplayed.
Most of the tension is between you and everyone else, but there's very little
drama between the surrounding cast of characters. Another weird detail is that the brass seem to give very little concern to the sabotages and obvious leaks. Everyone is given the benefit of the doubt - except for you.
But after a slow start, I really got into Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the
Kilrathi. Like its predecessor, it excels at nothing, but holds enough of everything to fan my flames over the course of a fun playthrough. The missions are free enough for me to tackle however I choose, and the added difficulty makes every victory taste all the sweeter.
As for the flaws, I eventually got hooked by the narrative, for better or worse. I
learned to live with the technical hiccups, just like I did in the first
game. Remembering how old the game is, I also cast aside any hopes of profound drama and came to appreciate the story for the entertainment it provided - even though that end reveal got too hard to swallow. As for the trimming of
the mission tree structure, which some fans lament, I couldn't care
less. It was hardly a distinguishable feature in the first game anyway.
I'm gonna end with a plea: In this day and age, I know space flight simulators are out of fashion, but c'mon, isn't the time
ripe for a Wing Commander reboot? Whoever owns this franchise should get their act together (sadly, it's
probably Electronic Arts, since they owned the developers,
Origin Systems). Update the presentation, polish the story
campaign with some juicy Game of Thrones-inspired plot twists, spice it up with
some RPG mechanics and you're set to go.
I could even tolerate online multiplayer, but just fuck right off if you let
it become the main feature. In all my sense of entitlement, I claim Wing
Commander is a story-focused soap opera set in space - and not a playground for
snotty brats with nothing better to do. (That's a joke. I am kidding.)
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