An outdated, unrealistic game not worth the entry fee, nor the time it takes to get into it. There is nothing positive to say.

Let me begin by saying that I did not like this game at all. I did not like it’s ugly box, it was worse than the first star fox. This game I did not like to play, I’d prefer the dentist any day. I could rhyme about how bad it is all day but first I need to explain just what made this game so unenjoyable.

When I think of games based on television shows, no positive images come to mind. The Buffy game for Xbox, as one example, was decent but nothing special. I hoped that this game would convince me otherwise but my hopes were thrown to the wolves.

I used to play the Wing Commander games and loved every minute of them. From the back of the box I thought this might take me back to those days. Other than the fact that the flying is in space, this game is nothing like Wing Commander.

Now I understand that this is an arcade shooter and the level of realism for space flight isn’t going to be anything spectacular but there are certain standards that I think should be followed in space flight sims.

1: One shot should not destroy anything, no matter how weak the armor of the ship might be. 2: When one ship runs into another ship, both should blow up. 3: When a ship runs into an asteroid going full speed, it should blow up. 4: Wingmen are there to help you, not to fly around and get shot. 5: No army has an infinite amount of fighters, they must stop coming at some point.

Now, looking at Battlestar Galactica, it does not follow any these standards. One shot is enough to destroy a ship or a cannon but not enough to destroy a satellite. This makes no sense to me but this isn’t enough to completely ruin the game. When it fails to comply with rules two and three though, I begin to have a real problem.

Much to my surprise, when I first started out and ran into an enemy ship neither of us were destroyed or even damaged. Then, I ran into an asteroid, completely on accident, and was not destroyed. I bounced. That’s right, BOUNCED! Now I must have missed the last update in the word of physics. When did two colliding objects, both going at high speeds, begin to bounce off of each other?

As bad as those three factors are, they do not make the game unplayable. What does make the game unplayable is the fact that wingmen do not do anything. Well, that isn’t entirely true. They fly around and get shot at, and then yell at you to come protect them. If one of your 3 wingmen die, the mission is failed.

I was constantly drawn away from the actual mission, which they did not help with, in order to keep them alive. This caused me to spend hours, that is right, hours, on the first mission. There has never been a game that made me spend that much time on the first mission.

If that weren’t bad enough, there is no end to the enemy’s squadron of fighters. They continue to come from nowhere until you complete the mission objectives. So, to sum up these negative features, there are an infinite number of enemies that kill your cannon fodder wingmen. One hit kills them as you fly through a field of bouncy asteroids.

I found that a reasonable strategy for killing the enemies is to hold down the A button and spin. If I were to compare it to another game I think it would have to be space invaders, only with slightly better graphics.

The graphics were not bad, it was actually the best part of the game. Sometime I would just let it sit there and watch as the stars flew by. Once or twice I was able to forget about how bad the game was. Then I would pick the controller back up and all the memories would return.

The speech from the computer sounded the same as the speech did in the original Wing Commander. That was back in the early nineties. I thought that the speech technology had evolved.

Do not buy this game unless you are looking for some mindless aggravation.


Review by Kris Warshefski.