V2000

The Good
The graphics are very colorful and detailed (for 1998), the sound is acceptable as well as the game play. All worlds have a nice map which shows the position of every enemy, creature hive and human civilian.

The Bad
The controls are almost a nightmare (specially the aiming ones). Combined with the camera (which never changes direction) and the huge ship's inertia, it's extremely difficult to aim and precisely position the ship. Also, the enemy creatures have an deathly accurate aiming precision, so their shots almost arrive at their target (the player)!

Finally, the game can only be saved at the end of a map, which doesn't help much on this game... oh well, could be worse!

The Bottom Line
The game is of arcade type, so the people who like games with lots of enemies, constant shooting and extreme difficulty will find themselves at home.

The Good
I earned 375 pounds writing a walkthrough for a PC magazine for this game. I have not-entirely-fond memories of grabbing screenshots at half-two on the morning of January 1st, 1999, cursing David Braben. In brief, then, V2000 is Virus - which is 'Thrust' in 3D, or 'Lunar Lander' if you're old - but with much nicer graphics. You pootle over seas, islands, swamps, in some stunningly attractive forests, all the time blowing away insects and the like whilst trying not to smash into the ground, which happens a lot. The control method - tilt your craft, fire the engines, tilt the other way, crash - doesn't really get much easier with time and the gameplay is horribly, horribly hard in a bad way; too often you lose because, on the other side of the map, one of the citizens you are protecting has been munched. It's the kind of game where, if you don't act immediately with split-second timing as you start a level, you lose.

The Bad
As above - it's blisteringly hard, and I genuinely don't like to think about this game. I had to play it all the way through without cheating in less than a week, during the middle of a cold winter, and I don't want to go back. As with 'Lander' (or the last 'Populous' game), it's just too fiddly to be rewarding. It looks stunning, though. Furthermore it further cements the perception that David Braben never allows gameplay and fun to get into the way of his odd obsessions; with 'Frontier' the game suffered because of a stringent devotion to accurate physics, and this suffers from an unforgiving skill level exacerbated by unthinkably frustrating ship control.

The Bottom Line
A heartbreakingly frustrating experience.