Wing Commander: Prophecy

"This is space combat like never before. A new engine delivers unparalleled visual excitement and tactical realism. A new and terrifying alien menace, conceptualised by renowned visual futurist Syd Mead (Blade Runner), threatens mankind's very existence. The all-star cinematic story-line (with return appearances by Blair, Maniac and Rachel) introduces you to new characters and entirely new areas of the Wing Commander™ universe, and the first-person, real-time 3D engine will have you on the edge of your seat, living deep space combat more real than anything you've ever experienced."

Interesting game for the GBA. You would think Wc1 or WC" would be more suited for the handheld, more like the pc version than the snes but no. Those were skipped over and we jump straight to Wing Commander prophecy, the fifth game in the series utilising rendered 3d polygons. Even PS1 owners didn't get a version of this. Making wing commander work on just the six gba buttons works quite well although you have to jump into the pause menu for radio/eject and mission status functions. The game is well presented with a long opening sequence and in game static cutscenes (fmv was not going to fit on the cartridge).

However, once we get to the actual game the problems start to show themselves. Firstly the controls can feel over sensitive and floaty meaning you will over shoot your target quite often. Enemies can fly very erratically making them difficult to chase down. Of Course that's part of the dogfighting challenge but what you don't know is, there is a hidden time limit in many levels. Take too long and the enemy will destroy the midway carrier and its game over so you need to destroy the enemy with some haste. Other missions will have an on screen timer. The game is played on the default medium difficulty here and the enemy can be stupid or really cheap. They will either let you fly right by and destroy capital ships with ease or line you up for the kill with 2 or 3 rockets in quick succession with only half a second to fire off the decoy which doesn't always work killing you almost instantly without knowing why. It's worth noting that I'm having to pretty much hold afterburners on all the time to even get near the enemies. Afterburning doesn't help for evading missiles.

The games biggest problem though is the 50 missions you need to complete. The missions are pretty much all the same. Destroy all enemies. There are no escort or dodge asteroid missions to keep things interesting. Each mission can have bonus objectives like kill x amount of fighters which are needed to get a 100% mission rating. I have no idea if getting 100% on every mission changes anything as the good ending was still shown here. The mission computer keeps tabs on how well you did in each mission. The longplay is not optimal due to me just killing anything and everything instead of just the mission target which drags the video out longer than it needed to be, but I am top of the kills board by some margin.

Overall, its a good technical achievement to have the game running on the GBA but unfortunately this version is just not fun to play and feels like a grind. At the end of the game I show ejecting and the bad ending.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:06:20 H'Rekkah System
00:32:25 G'Wriss System
00:54:00 H'Hrass System
01:03:05 T'lon Meth System
02:26:50 Hrissith System
02:57:45 Kilrah System
03:21:02 Bad Ending