This review was first published in E10, July 1994.
Anyone who’s loaded a 3DO game before will know the procedure: 1. Insert disc. 2. Marvel at beautiful rendered images. 3. Gasp at wonderful sound. 4. Notice complete lack of gameplay and switch off in disgust. Super Wing Commander is exactly the same – except for the last step.
Wing Commander has enjoyed considerable success on a variety of formats, but this 3DO version is without doubt the best of the lot. Developers Origin could have chosen the easy option and simply ported the already excellent PC version, but that’s not their style. Instead, they’ve isolated the rougher aspects – including the scaling of the in-game fighters and the substandard Star Cruisers – and smoothed them out, while leaving the rest of the game intact.
One part of the game that hasn’t changed is the storyline. As in every other version of Wing Commander, you play the part of a rookie wingman, enlisted to help in the Confederation’s battle against the evil Dralthi. To begin with, you’re given simple missions – fly to a certain location, take out a few enemy fighters, and then fly back to the safety of your mothership, the Tiger Claw. But once you’ve got a few kills to your name, things get a lot more interesting: sorties become more intricate, the atmosphere intensifies and the plot starts to unfold.
As in the PC version, each mission is self-contained, with its own plot and conclusion, but they’re all an integral part of the main story. Every mission you tackle – whether you’re victorious or not – affects the confederations chances of success, and with 72 potential missions, Super Wing Commander’s plot has more twists and turns than an Alton Towers rollercoaster.
Elsewhere in E10, we asked 3DO CEO Trip Hawkins: “Is it all over before it’s even started?” It was.
To describe Super Wing Commander as satisfying to play would be a grotesque understatement. Pursuing the enemy at close range, letting ‘em have it right up their exhaust port with your missiles and then watching them explode in a shower of twisted metal is disturbingly gratifying stuff. The controls, despite their complexity, have been successfully crammed onto the 3DO’s five-button control pad; although the 22 different commands seem daunting at first, after you’ve chased a few fleets of Dralthi fighters they become second nature.
Then there’s the atmosphere: Super Wing Commander is absolutely dripping with the stuff. This is largely thanks to some brilliantly rendered cut scenes (many of which don’t appear on the PC version, incidentally), but the stirring music makes a significant contribution as well.
Origin’s improvements to the in-game graphics also help: the alien craft now scale more smoothly, are more detailed and move around the screen faster than ever before – with no evidence of slowdown. The aesthetic improvements to the game are most apparent when you face a Star Cruiser for the first time: not only are they now absolutely enormous, but they’re also incredibly detailed and impressively shaded. In fact, the more you play, the more you realise how much ‘tweaking’ of the original game has been undertaken by Origin.
For those of you unfortunate enough not to have played Wing Commander before, you should be prepared to put in a few late nights to get into the game properly. But be warned: once Super Wing Commander gets a grip of your senses, you’ll have to prise it off with a crowbar. So far, most 3DO software has been completely unworthy of attention; happily, Super Wing Commander avoids falling into the same category.
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