The Man, The Myth, The Legend

Chris Roberts just about single-handedly invented the space sim genre. Wing Commander was far and away the most graphically advanced game of its time, and simply blew all other action games away with its gameplay. Wing Commander II was the game that finally set apart Creative Labs' SoundBlaster brand from all the competition, when the speech pack was released. Wing Commander III made the best use of full motion video of any game up to that time, and had absolutely amazing 3D graphics (without a 3D accelerator.) Wing Commander IV was the best film on computer, bar none. It's the only one of the Wing Commanders I cheated in, just to get past the missions and see more of the plot.

Briefing

End of Briefing - the Alliance Logo

That was the last Wing Commander, or any game, that Chris Roberts was involved in, as he left Origin to work on his film, then later formed Digital Anvil with his brother Erin. Not much later, they announced that Microsoft would be publishing the first game to come from Digital Anvil - Starlancer. British developers Warthog were signed on to help, and the wait began.

Years In the Making - It Shows

It's been a couple of years now since the announcement, and Starlancer is fairly close to completion. While over at Microsoft's Gamestock we managed to get our hands on a beta version of the game and have been playing it since we got it on a machine. After watching the intro movie and playing some instant action, we fired up the singleplayer game.

Ship Selection

Predator rocks - blind fire owns you

Wow. This is one polished beta. Sure it has bugs and a few quirks, but, as far as we can tell, most of the content is in and finalized. The missions are working fine and are very robust. There really didn't seem to be a way to mess them up even at this stage of development, which bodes well for the final product.

The graphics are fast and smooth, while the sound is clear and crisp. We detected no signs of glitches in either, again a good sign. AI properly ranged in ability from easy, through competent to hard depending on the difficulty settings you chose. But, enough about the state of the game as it is.