Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri

The Good
Great outdoor environment, wide variety of missions, plenty of surprises (not all the missions are as straight-forward as the briefing would lead you to believe), plenty of weapons and gadgets, lots of commands for your squadmates.

The Bad
No multiplayer (time when Duke and Quake offers them), some missions ridiculously hard (the pacing isn't quite right), not enough ammo for the ammo-based weapons.

The Bottom Line
Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri is the "mech" game that manages to provide as immersive experience as the more famous mech games, like Mechwarrior 2.

The video briefings are decent and the cutscenes are quite good, as Wing Commander 3.

The textured terrain and such, with the low-res engine, is a bit weak when others are using cleaner-looking but high-res graphics. The actual enemy units are sprites. At least the explosions look rather decent (if a bit bitmap-ish). When you destroy an enemy unit the pieces litter the landscape. Few programs do that... (they tend to disappear after a while).

There are features that simply cannot be found on ANY mech game. With 3 multi-function displays, you can actually get a true-360 view of your surroundings (with the main screen as "front"). NO OTHER GAME offer you this feature. There's also use of repair modules, demolition modules, and such that much be managed by you, which adds to the strategic considerations.

The lack of multiplayer in the times of Duke and Quake, however, prevented the game from receiving the audience that it should.

The Good
There's so much to like about this game. The missions were great (I especially love the covert ops mission), the graphics were great, and the sound was good, too. Back in 1996, the game used QSound to do some positional sound. It was a great feeling back then to blast up some foliage and hear the sound go through you as you walked through its remains. The CG was, and still is pretty great. The intro to the game was spectacular in its day, and still fun to watch today.

The one great design decision I remember about this game was its loading screen. Rather than give a static "Loading..." message, the game displayed an outfitting message. Rather than traditional mechs, you played with "powered battle armor." When loading the next mission, it would say something like "Preparing SFC Squad for Mission." It would then list PBA loading info about each squad member. For example:

N. ap Io Cold Fusion Plant Started Warming up Weapons ... SFC PBA Ready

It would then move on to the other people in your squad. Back when I played it, this method made the loading times very transparent, even when missions took a few minutes to load (load times varied from zero to a few minutes).

The Bad
While the FMV plot development was technically well pulled off, the story was pretty bad. Think B movie sci-fi.

The Bottom Line
A well-designed romp in a creative mech-alike game.

The Good
What the team behind 'System Shock' did next, this was a late addition to the wave of 'walking around in a metal suit' games that sprang up at the time, although this time the suit is just slightly larger than you. Unjustly ignored, the game's P75-punishing graphics engine produced some fantastic visuals (the open-air vistas stretched away for miles), and there were some intriguing missions, including a couple in low-gravity environments.

The Bad
The gameplay itself was only so-so. There was only so much strategy involved in running backwards whilst firing constantly, and a couple of the missions were much too hard, in an unfair, 'X-Wing' way. The between-mission FMV sequences are just as bad as all other between-mission FMV sequences. It didn't take very long to finish, either, and you probably won't get it to run on modern machines.

The Bottom Line
An unjustly ignored Mechwarrior-esque FPS with remarkable visuals.