I don't understand this game. Why it exists, what they tried to do with it, and what they expected people to get out of it. We're four games deep into Coktel Vision's space action games, and while we're slightly better in combat than we were in 1990, we're just getting to, well, it's acceptable, while the rest of the game has been suffering more and more. Galactic Empire had an excuse, it was 1990 and nobody knew what the hell a first-person shooter was, Inca II does not.
My best guess for all this, is that the people assigned to do a game with space combat were not fans of space combat games. They had a list, and had to stick with it. Of course, they didn't put any effort into the adventure game portion either, but we expect adventure games from Coktel, not space sims. The attempts at making the plot more shifting feels like it was taken from space games, since Wing Commander is the only game of this era that actually managed to do something like that.
Which goes all out the window when I look at the credits and see names that were the previous games, some even worked on E.S.S., so they believed in this idea. How are they six games deep into this vague concept and nowhere near being better than when they started? I realize that outside of E.S.S., it's all been downhill score-wise, but that hides that Galactic Empire and Inca were both more about the experiences than the actual gameplay.
He's spying on you!
Inca II is not really about the experience. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the game has the balls to treat its characters like people and to kill off a main character, but it doesn't keep itself going after that. When I started, I kept thinking about Krull, a visually interesting movie with an unimportant story. Inca treated its world of a resurrected Incan figure in space as completely sane despite being, well, crazy, and I thought Inca II was trying to make the story grounded, the forces of good are just Incan-inspired, the bad guys are just Spanish-inspired.
These space combats are the only place where the story choices matter, you get more if you chose certain actions, which may make the last one easier.
The plot goes off the rails when the main character, Atahualpa, dies and we're forced to play as the main character from the first game, Eldorado. Despite the promises of a branching story, there seems to be no way to avoid this. It's at this point that ideas seem to be pulled from places that have no place belonging in the story as previously established. Every planet seems to have a random person on it who seemingly could not have gotten there and there are frequently no signs of anyone else. It's not surreal, it's ill-fitting.
Eldorado is weird this time around. In combat, he's very obviously mortal, but the existence of his powers implies something a lot more is going on. Most of the game is dedicated to laying down his powers to destroy a great asteroid threatening the Earth, but not that it's going to crash into the planet. At other times, he seems subservient to people he shouldn't be subservient to, like his wife or someone who is effectively a random guy on the council he set up.
WHAT!?
To top it all off, we don't even get a resolution to the game, at the end it turns out that a here-to-unmentioned god (Unless you count the European title) got awakened, presumably by Eldorado, and then does some stuff. It's not even a sudden downer, he just comes back and shoves off. Nor is it a Cthulhu Ex Machina. What was the point of anything then!?
Getting to the gameplay, we now just have space shooting sections and adventure sections, no more ground combat. I can't help but feel that this change is for the worse, it's not that they were good in of themselves, but they made adventure sections you moved around in; Here every adventure section is very self-contained. Maybe this would be better if they were better, but I just feel limited in what I can do in every place.
Most of all, this feels like an interactive movie, better than that implies from the time, but worse than that should be. It's feels like you're just acting out your part in a script you haven't read, and everyone else just awkwardly stands there waiting for you to do your part. Things that would make sense for a character in a movie to do fill the game. The game frequently does these in a way that only works because you have such limited options that you would naturally do these things just by clicking around.
Look ma, a 3D cutscene!
Don't get me wrong, there are actual aspects of this that are an interactive movie, like little cutscenes that play to show some action has taken place or the overwhelming importance of the story. Which is odd because it doesn't feel like the story should be the primary part. It's just that usually when a game is like an interactive movie, it's either a crappy game full of FMV, or a game with a nice story that puts you in control of the nice action scenes. I'm guessing this is just a failed attempt at the later, but my last guess was very wrong.
Such lovely art, wasted here.
The adventure game sections are pointless, they're just there for pretty backgrounds. But the space sections, well, they're just there because the last game had them. I could go into detail, but you basically move with the mouse and you have an infinite laser weapon, along with specialized missiles for special targets. I want to point out that I was playing along with the TAG review, and Ilmari, who lost every space battle last time, won the final space battle. If someone who admits they aren't good at the genre won, do I need to go into detail? Though I must admit, I'm not sure there's much detail to go into.
It's not technically just moving the face up and down, but it sure looks like it in motion.
Visually, it's very nice, the 3D is of the period to a certain extent, but the 2D art is very nice. Two complaints I have are that some of the 3D animations loop far too obviously, and the real actors are animated by moving parts of their face down. That's very awkward, and I can't help but feel like it was intended as a counter to Lost in Time's lack of showing the mouth. Like these guys felt that no mouth was a lame move. I think it's the opposite, no mouth gave a mysteriousness to that game, whereas this felt cheaply animated.
If anything, the game looks too good for what it is. It's like a book where the cover is really cool, but the actual writer is boring at best. Often, a really beautiful screen will flash by for a single moment, never seen before or after. A graphic artist's hours are not the same as a programmer's hours, but still, they were used for something that wasn't that important.
The CD version I played added in some stuff which honestly made the experience worse. There's a maze and then a final puzzle which add absolutely nothing to the game, much like the rest of the endgame. Then we have the voice acting. Everyone is terrible. Sometimes this works in the game's favor, like Atahualpa sounding like a whiny teen or the Han Solo knock-off sounding like he's collecting a paycheck. Other times it doesn't, like Eldorado being wooden in a way that never works. When Eldorado's son dies, his cry of "no" doesn't sound like he's dead, just that he ordered an expensive souffle for dessert and he wants to see a football game at home.
To close this off, I just thing that in most little ways this game was worse. Like I said, Inca was an experience, this was not. There are no little touches that make the game come off as Incan-themed, even the music is just sort of there. It's not really Incan themed, it's just sort of there, filling the void. I recognize it listening to it after the fact, but it just isn't interesting or memorable.
Weapons: A laser weapon with a weird firing arc, and basically weapons that take out one kind of target. There's no crosshair, and there's no way to figure out where you're actually shooting. 1/10
Enemies: The game talks up a lot about enemy ships, how many varieties there are, how they're all piloted by different kinds of pilots. The difference is that some don't move, some do, and sometimes there are way too many. 2/10
Non-Enemies: Despite a great deal of implication, there are no in-game friendlies. 0/10
Levels: Something I never thought I'd say, but the game flows too well. It ensures that the game doesn't get stale, but at the same time it plays out like a series of events with no buffer between them. 3/10
Player Agency: You control 99% of the game with the mouse, shoot, turn, all the adventure stuff. Other actions require the keyboard. Plus and minus control speed, although it's sometimes automatic. The function keys select your weapons. Some other keys, along with spacebar, control your targeting. You can tell it's a European game of this era when the developers don't understand how a keyboard is supposed to be used. 5/10 Interactivity: Click on things and things happen, sometimes the puzzle makes sense, often it doesn't even if it should. 2/10
Atmosphere: In theory, a wide variety of differing places and moods should work for a space opera game...but that is done far better in other works. 3/10
Graphics: For the most part, beautiful and well-animated. 8/10
Story: I don't understand any of this, at all. 1/10
Sound/Music: It's fine, everything works, nothing feels out of place, but nothing is memorable. 7/10
That's 32, but I feel it's inappropriate for it to be higher than Inca given what I've said, so let's subtract 3 more for 29.
Is this one of the worst games of all time? Personally, I'm going to say no, but I can see where someone could argue for it. Would I say it's one of the worst adventure and/or space simulation games ever? Adventure, no, any game that I can finish within 6 hours is not near that list. Space simulation, maybe. I haven't played enough yet to know if something like this would qualify. The thing is, to be one of the worst games you really have to have hated it.
I don't hate Inca II, I am confused by it. It doesn't know if it wants to be as crazy as the original or just a space opera game with an Incan theme, starting off somewhat mundanely before going into utter insanity. The space combat sucks, but somehow two people who sucked at it managed to bumble their way into winning it. Even the more chaotic battles. The adventure game sections, even when they come off as reasonable, manage to make themselves seem convoluted.
It's not something I'll ever have a bugbear about, but it just leaves me scratching my head. Why did they do this, and why did they do this that way? A lot of good time was spent on this game, and nothing ever really tied it together. More than any other Coktel Vision game, I want to know what was going on behind the scenes. I understand where other games are starting and going, at least vaguely, this feels like three different plots tied together. Why the ending? Why the ending?
The next, and final Coktel Vision space game is 1995's The Last Dynasty, which by my current reckoning, will be played along whenever TAG covers it in 1995, assuming it's another adventure/action hybrid like the past four. Other Coktel Vision games will probably be played when I get to the years they're released in and whether or not they're actually worth playing here, I think only a couple are fully within my interest. For now though, it's time to return to Rejection, and not a moment too soon.
Rather suddenly, I've had the need to clear off some space on my desk. And what do I have on my desk that's most convenient to move? Old games. Hence a sudden shift in what I'm playing.
This doesn't actually play during the intro, you have to wait for it to show up on the menu.
Hunter Hunted is one of two games in Sierra's k.a.a. line of games, the other is a fighting game called CyberGladiators. Both were developed by Dynamix and I struggle to think of why this is any different than most of Dynamix's other output. The story is, sometime in the late 20th century, a group of aliens called The Masters killed most of humanity and enslaved the rest for games of their own amusement. Hunters, as they're called, are put into the ruined remains of a city and fight various creatures. In some cases they are the hunters, taking out traps and robots. In others, they are the hunted. Humanity is not the only race, there's also one called beasts, who look like minotaurs.
You play as either Jake, whose last name I could have sworn was Hunter (or the Japanese title Jake Burst) or Garathe Den, the beast. You have to survive some 65 missions, finding equipment/parts to put on a car in order to make it spaceworthy, and escape the Masters.
There's something to be said for the era when companies played around with their logos like this; these days some bigwig would be upset that they were "making fun" of their logo.
The intro, as broken as this is through WINE, is interesting. There's a pretty neat rendition of the Sierra logo, followed by Dynamix's blue fuzzball coming on screen...before Garathe Den comes on-screen and splats him against the wall. Also, there's an Escape from New York reference that isn't from a Metal Gear Solid game.
Then, we get this. Uh, thanks to WINE, I didn't get to see it, but it does explain what is supposedly the concept of the game. Supposedly, because it's fairly obvious that near the end the two will join sides.
Text boxes like this appear sometimes. Because of the game's very '90s Windows nature, these sometimes pop up outside the main window.
The game just goes straight into it when you press new game. First you get a tutorial as Jake. Controls are sort of like a more arcade-y Blackthorne, that old Blizzard cinematic platformer. Left and right moves, shift jumps, ctrl shoots, z punches, X slows you down, down crouches and up is stealth. You can move while crouching but not while hidden. Secret passages and doors are found by moving into them automatically, other interactables are done via up. Weapons are selected via page up and down.
This is a fairly simple training mission, with a few non-threatening mines to shoot and then you get an exit door. It feels too simple to get used to the game. Despite playing mostly like an old-fashioned arcade platformer, albeit with some fancy aiming, this is in many ways like a FPS of the period, health, which can go up to 199 with the right pick-ups, armor, weapons and ammo are separate. Ammo goes up to 99, and while each weapon has it's own pick-up, the amount of ammo you get varies from level to level. No real power-ups, however.
Stealth is weird. Some enemies respond to it by walking away, others just sort of stand there, and others shoot at you like you're still there. Either way they'll stay pretty close to where they are. Hiding prevents you from getting shot, but explosives still have their normal effects.
Movement is generally fine, but there's a lot of issues around the edges. You can find yourself caught on a wall that doesn't exist or in a way that doesn't make sense and the only solution is to jump.
Then you get a tutorial as Garathe, much like Jake's training. Curiously, Garathe gets two melee attacks, fists and a club thing with better range. I'm guessing Garathe is supposed to be more of a melee fighter while Jake is more of a ranged fighter. Garathe gets knives to throw at enemies, which is kind of hard to hit the mine with. Even worse, the guy's movement sounds are over the top, when running he breathes a lot, and his walking sounds still feel a bit too noisy.
There are two key things this level introduces besides getting used to the alien minotaur. Climbable locations, works like you'd expect it to, up and down; Secrets, like I said earlier, just walk into walls to find secrets. Here, I get grenades.
The end level screen, this shows up even if you lose, so you can figure out how many secrets a level has. Treasure refers to stuff like the car parts, which you need anyway.
Couple of more things, if you press up and shoot just before you go into stealth, you shoot up. With grenades this is more like an awkward arc, it's basically impossible to hit a mine with a grenade. If you crouch and shoot...Garathe screams and hurts himself, presumably this has some purpose later in the game. You can shoot diagonally down with down left or down right.
There's a lot of voiceover in this game. For games I've been playing lately, but that's to be expected when you're mostly playing '80s titles. Every intro has an alien mocking Jake or Garathe that isn't actually written down. You know, what we expected games would be like in the '90s around this time, everyone would just listen to the game instead of...gasp...reading text. Not that any of it is very important.
I'm just going to put the individual parts up here and summarize the "interesting" (though most are) levels afterwards.
Your character changes color each mission, Jake's shirt or Garathe's fur. In either case, when poisoned, they shift to green.
There are about six groups of traps and like things:
Poison, comes in the form of dripping ceiling puddles, ground puddles, poisoned food and jets that shoot out. Poison slowly damages you until you find a green medikit. A lot of levels center around these, and they range from annoying to terrifying.
Dart traps, what you think, if you're within it's line of sight, it shoots out darts. Varies in damage and speed from mild nuisance to basically dying in a few shots.
Ceiling rams, don't have a better name for these, when activated, they swing from side to side. As lethal to enemies as they are to you.
Jump pad, they push you along a certain arc. Very annoying because they knock you down while they do it.
Barrels, they explode. Sometimes they just explode, other times they create burning fire, which lasts for a while.
Teleporters, they teleport you. Uses the radioactive symbol. Some are hidden.
This doesn't get into how the game uses more advanced triggers to trap you or screw you over. Disappearing and reappearing walls happen on whatever notice the level developer wanted.
For visibility's sake, I've been cutting out the window part of the window, though these menus are quite essential to playing the game. (you have no real restart function, so you need to stop in the middle of a mission)
Enemies:
Mines, they slowly move towards you while floating. Can be annoying to hit, but not terribly lethal in isolation. Unfortunately, they usually come with spawners, big solid blocks which take a couple of rockets to take out. Come in four colors, with green being the easiest and red being the most dangerous.
Turrets, tricky to shoot right, but more because of always being on the ceiling. It's easier to hit them at an an angle, but I kept screwing that up. Come in many kinds, which range from mild nuisance to dead. At least you can avoid their shots if they aren't pointed at you. Their shots, even in the weakest variants, can range from constant stream to short bursts. They're never fooled by stealth.
Chaos Creepers, like mines, except they run at you. Dangerous until you figure out you can shoot diagonally down, less so when you do so. Mostly placed in locations you shouldn't be in anyway.
Chameleons, xenomorph-like creatures which jump around. Surprisingly not as lethal as they sound.
Manta Ray, annoying but not very deadly. They hide like you do, so while you can see them, you can't attack them until they break out of cover.
Floating blobs, these guys might have a name, but they were only briefly mentioned if true. They're like the mines, except slower and less lethal. The gray ones don't move unless you're unlucky while the yellow ones are quick on the draw. Best punched to death.
Security droids, the most annoying of the enemies. They shoot at you like the turrets, except they're usually alert and they have a bigger range of view. They shoot out a burst, which ranges from managable in green, to do not get hit in red. This guy can actually stunlock you out of the hiding animation. Tedious to kill in the best of situations, which means the later levels are full of them.
Sentinel droids, or Molotov Cactus. Stationary things which throw out a group of explosive when you get within a certain distance. Unfortunately, you can only hurt them when they're attacking.
Ants, uh, they appeared on a few Hunted levels, but were otherwise a non-entity. I don't think I ever fought one.
Bruiser, you know the ED-209 from Robocop? Like those. They shoot missiles, plasma projectiles, a flame thrower for short range and they can cause earthquakes. Lethal if you don't deal with them right, but otherwise simple to deal with, albeit they have a lot of health. No joke, on some levels you can just pummel away at them with a shotgun; their missiles go over you.
Death, a flaming skeleton. Shoots fireballs, teleports through everything and can't die. Or at least it's so impractical to kill you never do so in the entire campaign. Pretty easy to run away from and sometimes you can even lose him.
Other humans, they use Jake's model, but these aren't Jake. What weapons they have varies, but assuming you either have the club as Garathe or the shotgun as Jake you can handle them pretty easily by constantly knocking them down. Stealth is useless against them.
Other beasts, they use Garathe's model, but aren't Garathe. They have varying weapons, but usually they rush towards you. Unfortunately, unlike Jake, they only get knocked down by explosives, so you need to have some range before attacking them, lest you get caught in the explosion. Stealth is useless against them.
Weapons:
Fists, somehow Jake can punch a mine with no ill effects. I like that.
Club, basically replaces Garathe's fists for most levels. Useful for taking out the more mobile enemies thanks to it knocking them down.
Pistol, Jake's basic weapon, shoots a burst of three bullets in whichever direction you're pointing. Very accurate and ammo is plentiful. Very useful for taking out turrets from a distance. Gradually decreases in importance outside of taking potshots at things from a distance.
Knives, Garathe's basic weapon. Because you only throw one at a time, it's worse than the pistol, missing is easy. It has one advantage, knives that miss can be picked up wherever they land. Seems to almost never be useful outside of early intro levels though.
Shurikens, they're like the knives, except they explode and gravity affects them a lot. With a really weird arc if you throw them straight up, they always slowly go lower "down". They can be picked up too after being thrown, as they only detonate on contact with enemies, on walls it's on a timer.
Whip, in theory, kind of crap, if you don't let it complete it's wind-up, you just pointlessly whip...except that functions as melee. It's projectile is nothing special, just a simple attack, yet in practice, it's very effective once you get used to it.
Shotgun, shoots out about 3 damaging pellets. Kind of weak for a shotgun, but I suspect that's only relatively, since, you know, you can take out big mechs with it.
Rocket Launcher, a very nice rocket launcher. Explosions happen through walls, I should point out. It's only real flaw is that you can't shoot straight up.
Right, back to the levels.
Jake Learns the Ropes, more like Dynamix violates the cardinal rule of level design, never start your player off under fire. (later on they'd violate the no secrets necessary to win, but eh at that point) A turret here, they range in damage and tactics, either they constantly track you or have a set pattern they follow and only shoot you when you reach it. Some weapons they're invulnerable to.
This actually explains what I just said about up and shoot. Down shoot for Jake, incidentally, causes an electrical field which slowly drains Jake's health. Rope ladders, as I'm learning on this level, don't quite work how I expected. If you climb to the top, you just sort of jump off, and while you can jump off at any time, it feels weird. You can also shoot, of course, but this causes Jake or Garathe to fall off.
Speaking of screwing with the player, Garathe's next tutorial explains poison. Also, he's dropped straight down at the beginning and naturally there's something that has to be reached while doing so. (Or you could find it through a secret later) This gets me a whip attack...which is just slow as molasses to fire, but it is an explosive projectile, which does give it some advantages.
So, poison, certain objects poison you, and it's slow damage until you find an antidote, a green medical bag to the usual white and red ones. This game has the usual assortment of items in a not really score based game, ammo, health and keys. Items don't really carry over between levels, the game just gives you whatever it is it wants to give you.
I can't think of any game that just lets you do this everywhere where you weren't some weird alien.
Oh, yeah, Garathe can grab onto the ceiling with jump + up. Actually, both can, it's just Garathe has such a bigger jumping power I noticed it sooner with him. It's very awkward to do, because you can't take to move, you have to hold down, there's an unskippable animation for both characters, which, when combined with the speed of moving up on the ceiling, feels like an eternity. This is all just a weird thing to have it took me a while to fully appreciate it as part of the toolkit.
Skipping over one of Jake's missions, it just has teleports and a point I'm going to make here anyway. Walking between areas via these big things. I know they have a name, but it's kind of hard figuring out what they're called since they behave similarly to how some games have distinct "planes" for characters to walk on, whereas this is just shifting areas.
Jumping is weird. Jake has a bunch of random jumps ranging from typical jump to last chance desperate fall-on-the-ground toss. I can figure out Garathe's seem to involve pressing up+direction and shift, but that doesn't work for Jake. It seems, based on how I can activate it, that it happens when he would trip over something. Huh, that's oddly involved.
This mission adds in a few things, we get some new enemies. Chaos creepers, who are basically smaller mines, slowly come after you and explode. Chameleon, female robots who basically work like xenomorphs, they're a pain to hit but even though I got poisoned and couldn't find an antidote, I still took out a few with the club.
Again with attacking the player as soon as a mission starts. I do figure out that you can shoot diagonally, which is a plus. There's a rocket launcher, funny how we got that before a shotgun. It's hard to tell how effective it is, nothing here is that strong. But now we get parts of the car.
In some missions you find pieces of a car, supping it up for space travel. Now I remember from one time I tried to play this in the past that this also gets built by some parts from Garathe missions. At least I think. I'll point out if it happens. I do note that it's kind of hard to actually spot these, I just mindlessly walk over everything and I usually get it by some means.
Garathe can't jump over these, his long jump hurts things he touches.
This level is still one of the tutorials, yet it's surprisingly open-ended. For as confusing as the 3d mechanic is, it makes the game feel a lot better than it would otherwise. Explosive barrels in this game are kind of cruel, sometimes they create this firey area that lasts for a lot longer than it should. Still the game knows how to use them, both in your favor and very much against. Barrels block the exit or sit beneath a turret. You can push them, but since they're always in a bunch, and it's impossible to push two barrels that are touching each other.
Jake 'Mines' His Own Business, guess the intro is over. Teleporter maze. This level design seems firmly entrenched in the labyrinthian kind of design, but so far that's working for it. There are traps, besides the obvious ones. Elaborate obstacles one has to avoid. I like that, but I wonder if the game is going to remember that.
This game also puts forth annoying numbers of mines here, first just a big group you can't easily reach, then some coming out of some spawners. They can't be destroyed, well, I got a rocket launcher, but it doesn't seem like it shoots up easily.
Intro: Garathe vs Chaos Creepers, hang on, the last mission wasn't an intro. This mission is important because it's the first timed mission. This comes in two varieties, one in which you have to reach the end before the time runs out or you die, and one in which you have to survive that long.
The game suggests using grenades against the creepers. Fine, that works, when I can wind up the throw. The whip is seemingly not as useful as intended, it won't hit things off-screen and the wind-up makes hitting things on-screen dangerous.
Another mission. Meet Bruiser, he's most vulnerable to being attacked from behind. So the game says, I took him out pretty handily by just spamming shuriken at him. This is one of the big enemies the manual warns you about. He's not too dangerous here, except that when he turns around he stuns you if you're on the same ground as him.
The numbers usually indicate which plane of the level you're on.
At this point, the mission turns weird. I go through the entire area I thought was available to me and there was no sign of the piece I'm supposed to collect. I know I'm supposed to collect something, because the game won't let me exit. Until I find it, hidden behind a side-crushing sweeper. Yeah, that's kind of a sign that the so-called neat bit the game advertises isn't up to snuff.
The first mission with security bots. You know, it's a bad sign when a new enemy is warned to you and you're given a shotgun and a rocket launcher. There have been other new enemies since I last mentioned them, like a robot plant which I think shoots explosives, but they haven't been trouble...at all.
Though I pretty much knew about these guys since they were in a Garathe mission, in which you had to avoid them. With the rocket launcher and the very generous 10 packs of rockets strewn around liberally, they're not very troublesome. They are less vulnerable to the shotgun.
Another Garathe mission, this time, based all around avoiding enemies and getting them to blow themselves up. You know, for a game that's trying to build this guy up as a hunter and Jake up as a hunted, I'd rather play as Jake. He has weapons I like using. Garathe's weapons all have weird quirks that make them difficult to use.
Jake's Hardware Store, a subtly timed mission, you're basically poisoned the entire time and have to survive on medikits you find. Makes actual combat very tense and inaccuracy a lot more troublesome. As I play more and more of this game, I find that while I don't care for the whole quasi 3d levels in theory, it does provide a lot of options in how you approach each level. Then there's the turrets, it's kind of hard to actually hit the turrets if you don't use explosives.
Robot Sabotage, still the intro, adds some interesting objectives. Usually you just get to the end and get a piece of the car, but here you have to take out some barrels and a red security robot. There's another bruiser here. Weird priority. I find myself dying frequently in each mission, but at the same time, each time I die I get closer to completing that mission. It's a pretty solid difficulty curve, and while you can't save in the middle of a mission, progress is saved and there's no penalty for dying.
The game has this weird habit in it's design to put down dripping poison puddles you have very little chance of dodging in at this point. But it's not as annoying as the low pits that have ropes, only at the bottom there's nothing. Considering how exploration heavy this game is, this feels conterproductive.
I haven't mentioned it before now, but the game shifts around the camera quite a bit. It only sometimes makes sense, like zooming out whenever there's an important enemy in the area. Other times it doesn't make sense, here, there's an extreme example in it zooming in extremely as you approach the red robot. Also, you can change the size of the window the game is in, yet this doesn't affect anything besides the size of the game world in pixels. Considering everything is pre-rendered 3D CGI, not the best decision.
Orb of Anarchy, a level with Garathe centering around the object of the same name. If it's on-screen, the arrow keys work in the opposite direction. More annoying than it sounds, because of the whole screen zooming in and out thing, and it seems to shift the second the orb gets on or off screen. This is by far the hardest level so far because of this. You're timed and there's barely any health.
A Vision of Death, pretty good level. There's a pretty clever set-up with a bruiser where if you run towards him, despite all reason otherwise, you end up getting some gear. But the real important bit is setting up the deadliest enemy of the game, called Death. Death moves through objects and is unkillable, and it's set up here perfectly, you're given the perfect opportunity to discover him and run straight for the exit.
So, after this each mission randomly consists of being either a hunter or hunted mission, these aren't connected to either character, rather, to what you have to do that mission. First up, play as Garathe and hunt down a human. Not Jake, just a random human. This adds in something really weird, on missions now both other humans and whatever race Garathe can appear. They're both hostile.
I'm the one dead here.
Both appear on this mission, though even if they didn't, because of a battle with a Bruiser while on a rope ladder, this would be a noteworthy mission anyway. Now not Jake enemies, they're the hardest so far. run and jump around like maniacs and throw grenades. This guy's dangerous just on his own, compared to everything else which functions more like a way of wearing you down.
You can resize the screen image, yet, all this does is increase how big whatever you see is rather than increase your vision.
Jake Cruises for Bruisers, "Now you are the Hunter, go forth and destroy". Take out seven Bruisers. Now we're getting into levels where you really have no chance of winning the first time around. As such the game cleverly teaches you several strategies of how to deal with these guys without getting hit. Some are more obvious than others, using grenades from above, abusing the ability to shoot in mid-air to shoot while on rope ladders. Others are more clever.
So, the whole climbing on the ceiling mechanic hasn't really been used much in combat yet. Mostly it's been around a few obvious bits of platforming. Well, the Bruisers don't knock you down when you're on the ceiling, making this approach safer when enemies are off-screen. (enemies don't move a certain amount off-screen, very annoying with these guys) So you climb up, and oh, look at that, the missile the Bruiser fires can't reach the ceiling and neither does anything else. Thinking about it, it's kind of weird that the movesets of these characters come off like a Xenomorph.
A hunted mission, Run for Your Life. No objectives other than staying alive. There are some new traps and critters, but it's actually not that bad of a mission. There are slowly moving electrical posts, easy to jump over; Ants, which work like the Chaos Creepers, but are slower and don't chase after you. I actually won on the first attempt. That's the first in a while.
Hunter, Scavenger, not too bad starting off. The game puts the pistol and the shotgun in two different alcoves nearby, more than making up for starting off with no weapons next to a turret. This one proves annoying because of the layout. The exit is surprisingly close to the entrance, yet you need to get several parts. Oh, yeah, and I died because I misjudged where the edge of the damage area was. Nice. Not because of the numerous dart traps or even the poison section, I just misjudged how high the fires damage.
Hunter, Throw the Switch. That's a typo, by the way, you're on a timer, you start with no ammo, and you have 10 health at the start. Clearly a hunted mission. You do gradually turn the tables on them, as you get ammo and weapons. I also discover that Bruisers can't shoot you when you're crouching, which is hilarious. Pretty good mission, especially when you get to exploit the AI's tendency to shoot blindly in your direction, like if two Bruisers will shoot at each other. Enemies shooting at each other is a thing that happens, but so far it's just been restricted to those robot fly trap things.
Hunter, Slaughter House. Kill a half dozen humans. Quite the task since they're all bunched up. What's also interesting is the opening section against some Chaos Creepers, you don't have any weapons except the club, so I figured out you could attack downward with the club.
Hunter, Three of a Kind. Garathe Den, but you find a part of the car. The game finally tells the player what he likely long since expected, Garathe and Jake will work together at the end. But first, Garathe has to kill three other humans. Including an annoying human with grenades stuck behind a locked door. You basically can't attack this guy without getting put in an awkward situation. Then the level gets obtuse, I make it to the exit and I've seen no car part. Worse still, I know there is no secret door I'm missing, and yet I've been everywhere and seen everything. In the end, I discover the game outright lied to me about there being no secret door and I merely missed it near the end.
As I mention later, I like the art direction, the main characters have a nice stylized look to them in particular.
Hunted, Take it From Jake. Weird to see an outright scavenger level, collect a bunch of different items while getting chased by humans. This level really puts into perspective how useful up+right/left jump can be with Garathe, if you're lucky, it damages and knocks down enemies. We're also getting into how secret doors, which once only took one or two seconds to open, now take like five, which is not at all annoying in a level where you're constantly running from enemies.
I'm pinned down in this screenshot, because one droid is firing while the other isn't, I can't get out of cover without getting shot.
Hunter, Apocalypse Now, very fitting. Take down six Bruisers, only these guys aren't the threat. To start off with, you seem to get some pretty good supplies, thirty shells, five rockets and five grenades, but that's nowhere near enough to fight what the rest of the level has, let alone the Bruisers. As soon as you take a step into the tunnel barrels are dropped onto certain locations, and the door out is right next to the last one. So you have to slowly walk across this. Then as soon as that's over with, you get to deal with a turret and a security robot right outside the next door.
The level is, at this point, divided between two sections, one with most of the Bruisers, and one wide mall hallway. The Bruiser area is further divided top and bottom by little holes which may have ammo in them, or they may have a robot in them. This is honestly a pain to deal with, because the robots aren't alert until you're in a straight line with them, there are not enough grenades to deal with the ones on the ground holes properly, meanwhile, there's no point in going after the ones in the ceiling holes.
The mall area is mostly tolerable, until you get to one section full of the blue security robots. These guys, if not properly lined up, can pin you down in stealth. Even if you're fighting them properly, you're still jumping in and out of stealth constantly. This whole level took me a while.
Hunter, You Against the World, take out three of Garathe's race and some other stuff. In an interesting twist, the usually not very troublesome not-player enemies are very deadly here. You need to spam explosives in order to knock these guys down, and you are never in a good position to deploy explosives.
Hunter, Bruiser Bashing, a lot of these late game levels are really long, this one came off the heels of an especially long just reach the exit level. This one obviously sets itself up as one of those. Take out 8 Bruisers, find a car part and to do this you start with 50 shells in your shotgun. Something tells me I'm going to need it. It's just one after another, so not too terrible, but you basically don't get a break between them. The game also gives you more pistol ammo than you'd ever need on a level like this, a lot of ammo from one pickup and half a dozen pick-ups, on a level with barely any enemies you would shoot with a pistol. I don't even think I shot something with a pistol.
Hunted, Power Outage. The level starts in total darkness. Lovely. Find a bolt in apartment 15, then take it to apartment 20. This is surprisingly detailed for a level briefing, and even better, I start with 1 health and 1 armor...and then the level just starts off relatively normal and throws a super health item at you. It does try to commit to the weird darkness gimmick by having walls close off behind you, but before long it turns into a relatively ordinary level of dodge the poison.
The actual gimmick of this level is a series of locked off apartments you can risk entering. You get a few grenades, but not many, and the first time through I used them to take out a security robot that was guarding a secret door that led to the keys. Making each new apartment very risky. Then you walk into Apartment 15 and meet Death. Apartment 20, by comparison only has another human and some explosive barrels. I got lucky.
Hunter, Efficency Expert. "Try to escape and find the car part." That feels creepy. There's a series of numbers on the walls. Why...? This feels more creepy than it should. Sounds are going off in the background that shouldn't usually be going off in the background. The car part I got by complete accident, it's in a hidden teleport. Escape is harder, until I realize what the numbers mean. They're where I should go.
That's correct, but I need to do something else first, there's a jump pad that won't activate. I do find this neat little area leading to some stuff though. I find the thing that activates the jump pad, only it leads to a dead end with some ammo. This is becoming more of a Tricks and Traps style level than anything else. If the central area spawned a bunch of monsters in it about halfway through. Oh yeah, and at the end you had to run away from a basically invulnerable monster...who ends up being unimportant compared to yet another Bruiser fight at the end of the level.
Hunter, Pinball. You know, I've avoided making the obvious comparison between this and Dynamix's classic puzzle game series The Incredible Machine, but it's true, the physics, the way each item is basically a pre-set piece yet can be customized in surprising ways. Pinball is the most obvious use of The Incredible Machine's capabilities, and so it is with Hunter Hunted. Half the level is getting bumped across jump pads in a really neat to see the first time around, annoying on replays kind of setup. Still a bit of a break from the chaos that's been going on.
Hunter, 457 Bourbon Street, take out the other human. You gotta love these late levels with such simple objectives. Is it really going to be that easy or are grenades going to be thrown everywhere like they found a warehouse full of them? It's simple, but you get quite a few sections where you have to play hide and shotgun with the security robots.
Hunter, Squirrel. Not especially notable, except for some reason the game gets really annoying about how it uses hidden teleporters. I had to fight my way up climb because the game was activating a teleporter to the exact same place I was at. Others are less annoying, but still push you back way more than they should. It's not difficult, just adds length in an already lengthy game.
Painting, Morpheus Kitami playing Armored Trooper Votoms: Dead Ash, colorized 2023.
Hunted, Mission of Mercy. Find an antivenom medikit. I kind of like how the game is throwing gimmick levels this late in the game. You actually have to poison yourself to get it, which seems weird considering the level is on a time limit to begin with.
Hunted, Death Comes Calling, at first it seems like it's going to be a terrifying level based around avoiding the death enemy, only for it to turn out to be a poison jog for the most part. I wouldn't have even brought up this level, except that this was apparently the final car piece, and I won the game. The outro cutscene, when I looked it up on the internet, shows the car driving through the same area as the intro and presumably flying off into the sunset. What will happen? Nobody knows. There was no sequel, though this takes place in the Starsiege universe for some reason. The final two missions are both hunted missions, and each, while nice, both feel like they should have come before Death Comes Calling. I think someone somewhere screwed up the order the missions were supposed to be in. After this, there are some MP missions which I can't properly play.
Weapons: Biased towards Jake, but a well-balanced selection of weapons, each mostly with their own use. Outside of Garathe's knives. 5/10
Enemies: While the game gravitates towards a certain number of them, there's a well-balanced select each with their own niche. 7/10
Non-Enemies: None.
Levels: The game gets a lot of mileage out of the hunter and hunted levels. Switching up the gameplay based around two easily understood concepts makes the game last it's length better than I would expect. But, I'm glad it ended when it did. 7/10
Player Agency: Questionable. It's very hard hitting enemies above you, and I got annoyed by how sometimes the game would go into stealth when I wanted to shoot or vice versa. There's also very noticeably several parts where the collision stops working and I start pushing against a wall that doesn't exist. It also takes some getting used to the whole "climb on the ceiling" bit, but that is cool. The controls themselves are mostly fine, outside of aiming and the attack you get when you press down+attack. 6/10
Interactivity: This leads into the same problem that basic movement does. It's a pain having to constantly push against a wall hoping it's a secret, or accidentally pressing up at a location that isn't the switch/exit and getting the animation, but not the actual thing you wanted to activate. It's your basic FPS-style interactions though, but an advanced form of them. 2/10
Atmosphere: Dynamix around this time had a habit of creating worlds which feel so much more alive than the game we get. I'm just walking around in some weird dungeon, yet there's the implication that the player is going around the remains of Earth and other civilizations. Why am I always in a mall or some sewer passage? 4/10
Graphics: It has a nice aesthetic to it, but I can see where the graphics have aged. This specific Dynamix 3D look is something I look upon fondly but can see why someone else wouldn't. The post-apocalyptic look is nice, but the animation feels...limited. 4/10
Story: Mostly irrelevant outside of the intro and outro. 1/10
Sound/Music: The sound is very...noisy. Like the game concentrates on just filling itself with sound. It works though, but it's just a bit off. Musically, the game has CD audio, and didn't play while I was playing the game. Instead I had to listen to the soundtrack elsewhere. It's pretty good, an industrial metal kind of sound, a bit of some darkwave-adjacent genre. I'm not really sure how well it'd fit into the game, though. 5/10
That's 41.
I think this game just came out at the wrong time, wrong place. Computers always had a tough time with platformers, even run and gun ones like this, but this game just came out the wrong year. We got Quake and Tomb Raider, and those didn't require Windows. This sort of casual, but not really wasn't going to hit any major part of the market, even discounting minor control issues. Reviews are positive but not great, indicating the sort of chilly reception this game got at the time.
There is a level editor and a patch which adds a few more levels. I screwed around with a couple and the editor after finishing the game. The levels seem to be on the hard side. The editor, on the other had is pretty powerful. You can pretty seamlessly switch between changing things on a level to seeing how those things work. I can see why they did a few of the gimmick levels with it now. Despite this, it does seem like it has a pretty steep learning curve for the more advanced stuff you can see in some levels.
The great plane game about the great war. Red Baron feels like the poster child for this era of flight sims, approachable yet realistic, and most importantly, fun. All the harsh reality of the first World War into a fun, idealized dogfighter.
The area depicted by the game.
Red Baron is quite a large game, depicting the most if not all of the French-German border, quite possibly the first game to do so with this level of detail. Granted, this is hard to appreciate in an era when we have games which depict the entire world in more detail.
You are given the choice of playing as either a member of the German Air Service or the Royal Flying Corps, though in the later case closely connected to the rest of the Allied forces. Select a career starting from the very end of 1915, to the very beginning of 1918 and ending a few months before the end of the war. Or you could play some random missions, possibly even make some yourself.
I fought this guy a lot. Not sure why.
I did two things, I fought a bunch of aces to get myself used to the game, then tried all the missions and then I did the campaign. A vast difference in opinion on everything ensued from the times I fought Herman Goering to the time I ended the war, and all of it doesn't quite work out the way you'd think.
Not quite the final situation I had, but the one I had for most of the practice runs.
The game vastly changes on two factors, the first are the various settings you can pick, ranging from general flight realism and difficulty, to minutae like if certain bits of equipment fail like they should in real life. While it all does affect score, it does allow you to have the kind of experience you want. While I put the difficult at a 4 out of 5, that's with a mostly realistic gameplay setting, I only turned off limited ammo and realistic navigation from the intermediate settings, while keeping flight experience at realistic. I think that I could have survived with realistic navigation. Other things, like limited fuel or you blacking out if you fly high enough, were basically non-entities.
The second are the planes. Planes range from crappy ones which are barely airworthy to planes so badass they were banned after the war, and every bit in-between. Yes, we have the legendary Sopwith Camel and whichever German plane people recognize off-hand, like they would make a game without the most famous planes of the war.
Nevertheless, different planes perform very differently. There are four broad categories of plane; the crappy ones you're stuck with at the start of the war, that the game forces you to use for a long time if you start early. The agile ones, they don't have as much speed or health as the sturdier ones. Then there are the occasional planes which function as great in all respects.
Planes each function differently than the others beyond the broad categorization. There are planes that fall apart easily if you start diving, though if I flew one, I never had it happen to me. The Sopwith Camel has an incredibly loose steering, to the point that it's hard to be level and takes getting used to.
What I did find to be an interesting annoying bit was, I think the Spad 7. Many planes couldn't do this, but the Spad 7 was one of the faster, and thus surprising incidents of this. If you want to turn around, left or right aren't necessarily the most effective, you won't be facing at what it is the way you want. Since you have a z-axis with a plane, you can turn down or up.
The problem is that some planes, well, they can't turn up. This isn't surprising when you're in a flying coffin, but for a not inconsiderable number of planes, doing an upward 180 degree turn was impossible, you'd stall out. This is both annoying and probably accurate. It's this sort of thing which creates an interesting thought process to plane selection. Do you want to actually turn around or do you want to survive getting shot?
This, of course, isn't necessarily the only factor in a plane's agility or constitution, but it's an easy quirk to point to compared to you and your enemy flying around in circles hoping to make the right turn before the other. Every new plane is a new experience and has to be adapted to.
Before every mission you get the option to change various flight features. Like what formation you're in, how many pilots you're bringing, whether you have regular or inciderary ammo, and what plane. That last bit is only relevant if you have your own plane, I.E., when you're a captain in the campaign mode. In case you needed a stock plane for this mission.
Controls are more or less the same as with A-10 Tank Killer. Numpad turns, space shoots, 1-9 control speed with plus and minus making minor adjustments. The first 7 function keys control your view. C compresses time, which is very important on the longer missions, though it automatically turns off if enemy planes are detected. It works differently depending on if you're the leader or if you have to follow someone, with you being in rough control during time compression being weird. Various other keys control commands you can give your wingmen. You don't get a heck of a lot in that last department, so little that I ended up just using simple attack commands whenever I felt the need to use them at all.
Thinking back to the rest of the flight sims I've played, I can't help but think that this is about as well as a flight sim can be expected to control and I was a bit too harsh on A-10. The keyboard controls work so beautifully that I never felt the desire to use the mouse or break out a joystick. Though from what I did do with the mouse, it works very well. I never felt like blaming the controls on my failures, rather the plane itself. A game has to have done something very right when I sound like a pilot blaming anything else for his mistakes rather than a gamer.
Combat is chaotic and frantic. Initial charges, if you have a good approach, can take out one or two enemies, which depending on how many there are could be quite fortunate. I've found that in opening approaches, the AI tends to fare worse if you're considerably above it or below it. Though being below has it's own disadvantages for you, like stalling out trying to shoot the enemy. From there, enemies and allies break off to do their own little turns, hoping to catch an enemy before an enemy catches them. I did decently enough with a smattering of practical knowledge. (remember to lead your shots) Considering how much credit is placed towards sneak attacking planes in what I've read, I think it's a shame that doing one yourself is, at best, practically impossible.
It's hard to figure out how well the AI is truly handling here, because missions feel quite random in how difficult they are. Sometimes enemies just let me kill them, presumably those were novice pilots. Others they put up a fight. Those must be regular pilots. Some are hard to kill, which means those are the veterans. Then there are the flying aces, men of historical reknown for killing at least 5 aircraft during the war.
This is with the crappiest plane the Allies have...
They were all quite easy. Even when I was fighting them in the campaign and I had to "duel" an ace and his two companions, including the Red Baron himself. So, what gives? I note that the hardest fights were usually in missions that weren't just straight aerial fights, there was always some defense gimmick. I'd be much more charitable towards the idea that this is just the varied skill of enemy pilots if I didn't gun down aces like they just got off the ground. Painting your paint red is like painting a giant target on it.
Friendly planes were greatly improved from A-10, though any plane capable of independent action as opposed to just following a pre-set path is a great improvement. That said, I also didn't understand friendly AI. Sometimes they took out the enemy easily, making me sort of unimportant, others they only exist to buy me time to take out the enemy planes. While part of the latter could be put down to being outnumbered, other times I didn't understand what was going on with my wingmen at all.
An important bit of fun in all this is the paint planes have. Each type of plane has a design, which you have to get close to see, and obviously an emblem of the service they belong to. However, at a distance planes are only visible by color. This isn't terrible in theory, but there are a lot of things that can cause you to be seperated from your wingmen...and German and Allied planes can have the same color.
Because of this, missions tend to have no logic to their difficulty, sometimes enemies prove to be a nuisance, others they just fall from the sky, practically just letting you shoot them. Boss missions, such as they are, consist of the aforementioned ace duels and if you're with the Allies, taking down a zeppelin. In the latter case, once you figure out they can't shoot at you from the back you can basically take them down with a 100% success rate solo. They are that easy. This puts the game in a weird dynamic where missions that should be these grand affairs are fairly relaxing, while some of the more mundane ones turn into slogs.
Escort missions are also varying in whether they're easy or slogs, but more importantly it's determined more by the number of enemy groups rather than their strength. (this also applies to patrol missions, but in that case you just fly over a certain piece of land and as long as you're alive it doesn't matter) Everything you escort basically goes along a set path, does whatever it is they do, with no deviations. This makes it really important in spotting enemies and taking them out in the initial confrontation, and then making sure nobody breaks off to take out a friendly. You've got a lot of waiting around to do and carefully matching speed in each of these. By the way, the AI can't cope with this and if you use time compression, your plane will jerk around like you're trying to turn into a tornado, and your wingmen will crash into each other.
It's a lot more fun when you're the one gunning down the escorts and the escortee.
Balloon missions, these were practically guaranteed to be a slaughter. A problem I didn't realize until much later is that the game is in a habit of giving you less planes than you need here, so you get shot down. Which isn't great, because pilots here are almost always deadly. To top it off, you're in enemy territory, which means they're firing flak at you. And because of realism, spotting enemies is wonky, you can see them at a great distance, but then you aren't seeing them again until they know you're here too. Far too many times I was the only survivor of these missions.
Meanwhile most defense missions are considerably less stressful, even if you have to prevent the enemy from blowing up a balloon.
I feel like at this point I should be able to put a name to the face, considering Dynamix's habit of having staff be the actors in their games.
The game's primary attraction is the campaign mode, in which you fight out the war roughly as it happened in real life. Roughly, there are presumably several historical errors in addition to the game giving you 2 or so missions a month compared to how real pilots would get put in the air daily if possible. Remember that one. Progress is measured by your points and kills, with the latter being more important for rank. Being able to lead your flight and getting to select a plane rather than getting any old one is far more vital than the various medals you'll get over the course of the game.
When I played the campaign mode I stuck with it for the entire thing, and that meant starting from the very beginning. Which meant using a very crappy plane for months. Even though I played as the Allies', the German side was no better, because both of the earliest planes are flying pieces of crap that deserve the nickname "flying coffin". This was an incredibly painful period which drags down the game quite a bit. Considering the historical record versus this, why should I have to fly a dozen or so missions in these pieces of crap when the game could start after a plane that isn't more dangerous to me than my enemies is introduced and just increase the length of the game that way? Why not three or four missions a month?
This is one of two times you get a newspaper about the fighting itself as opposed to someone entering or leaving the war.
While the game is good at offering the illusion of choice, it's just an illusion. While you can join any number of squadrons, fly alongside famous aces and shoot down others, you don't really do much. The war is going to go as it always did, the only change you offer is to provide an early release for the great aces. Unfortunately for me, that meant both the Germans and the Allies. No consequences for your actions like in A-10. Reading about the game on the internet later, I saw two things that could happen that didn't. Aces were supposed to randomly be on regular missions, assuming you were in the area, but I never encountered one outside of a duel challenge. If you transfer to the Home Guard, you fight against only zeppelins. Talk about leaving the war in style.
Worse still, real life events that brought horrible things upon either side...just didn't really happen here. Bloody April was an infamous event in which German pilots, equipped with planes with 2 machine guns, started gunning down Allied pilots in far greater numbers than they lost. And in my campaign...I never saw a double machine gun plane until I already had one. Some of the German's end of war planes were so deadly the Allies demanded all of them in their treaty...and by the time I fought them it didn't matter at all. Despite my complaints, each mission felt organic, but the campaign overall felt very gamey and predetermined.
You can get so close to the other planes you can practically touch them...and then you hear the sound of the two planes crashing and begin seeing the ground get closer...
Visually, the game looks pretty good for 1990 3D. It's aged badly, but worst of all I think, is spotting planes. There's no sense of slowly seeing a small shape get bigger, it's just there's a plane, watch out for it. I will note that the game does a pretty good job of depicting the game world, in the navigational sense. Multiple missions require you to pay attention to a map, which came with original copies of the game, but not my disc copy, and it works out beautifully enough that even without one you could get used to the area pretty well.
Various other bits of graphics look pretty nice. HUDs are nice and every bit as view obstructing as the real things. You can even see bits of your plane getting damaged. Effects are sprites, so if a plane is having engine trouble, expect to see little clouds of smoke. If something explodes, well, don't expect that good an explosion. If you get wounded the screen fades red in and out. Menu graphics are mostly real photos, some historical, others made by getting a couple of Dynamix dudes to pose in period military uniforms and just look cool. They look cool.
Despite all the complaints, I think that Red Baron is a pretty good game, which can be as simulationist or as arcadey as you want. Even with the campaign's shortcomings, it captures pretty well that naive sense of optimism and valor we have about the air part of WWI. That even as thousands are grinded down in the trenches there are still knights in the sky, nobly dueling each other until only the greatest emerges...or some jackass comes to a duel with two wingmen.
Weapons: Despite basically boiling down to having one or two machine guns with fancy ammo for special missions, the game really makes you appreciate those duel machine guns. 2/10
Enemies: I'm not sure what determines the skill of enemy pilots, but the game sure as heck makes you notice the difference between some pilots and some planes. 5/10
Non-Enemies: The shortcomings of friendly AI is far more noticeable than the shortcomings of hostile AI, but still, these are the only ones I've had that could actually win a mission on their own. 4/10
Levels: While the campaign is flawed, each individual mission is original enough that it doesn't matter too much. Just hope you don't have to fight in the clouds. 5/10
Player Agency: I think that beyond having the order commands be all across the keyboard, the controls are flawless. With the caveat that flawless in this case contains a certain bit of replicating flaws. 9/10
Interactivity: None.
Atmosphere: Practically the perfect depiction of a noble WWI air war. 9/10
Graphics: Very aged, but solid in multiple places, just be cautious of planes which share the same color as friendlies. 3/10
Story: Despite the rather free form of missions, the story feels entirely on-rails, but with the barest ability to kick people off the train early. To a certain extent this makes sense, you are but one pilot, but it also creates the sense that you as a player only ever make things worse, either for your side or the enemy's. 2/10
Sound/Music: Outside of theme music, there's no theme music. The game survives exclusively on Adlib sound. Bullets hitting, missing and the sound of canvas tearing. Oh, and we can't forget the roar of the engine. It's all rather soft-spoken. 2/10
That's 41. It's actually the first game to get a 41, as 40 and 42 have been the score of many of the better games so far.
I for one am looking forward to 5 years from now when I get to play Aces of the Pacific. Hopefully by that time I'll have some idea of how the air war went beyond "Allies won, Axis lost". Oh, come to think of it, I don't know which side I'll be playing in that one. I have no idea how I'm going to treat that, considering that to my knowledge, games where you play as the Japanese are rare, whereas everyone wants to play as the Americans. The only ones I know that are specifically about the Japanese side are the Japanese developed Zero Pilot series, so I might want to get an American perspective on the Japanese side.
Next up, however, is going to be F-15 Strike Eagle, which might not be the best follow-up to Red Baron, but I'm sure that'll only reflect better on both games.
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