Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri

aka: Free Fall
Moby ID: 516
DOS Specs
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Description official descriptions

Strike Force Centauri, the premier Strike Team on Alpha Centauri, was founded to combat pirates. As Nikola ap Io, you'll be leading them into combat. But the pirates are, too, well-armed, and the Terran Hegemony may be involved. When the covert action turns overt and a full-out assault is mounted by the Hegemony upon Alpha Centauri, all that stands in the way is SFC.

Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri is a first-person sci-fi combat sim featuring realistic sci-fi weapons with true 3D terrain. You control a power-suit with arm-mounted weapons: just aim (with mouse) and shoot, while moving completely independently (using the keyboard).

You can choose from multiple types of suits (scout, regular, heavy), multiple types of weapons (everything from simple lasers to railguns to missile launchers), multiple assistance modules (from mine layer to auto-doc), and up to three squadmates that'll follow your orders. You are pitted against enemies from pirates to tanks and mechs, even psycho clones and armed drones. Missions vary from attack and recon to rescue and defend, across three different planets in a variety of weather and terrain.

Similarly to Wing Commander III, the game features full-motion video sequences.

Spellings

  • Terranova: Strike Force Centauri - Common misspelling
  • טרה נובה - Hebrew spelling

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Credits (DOS version)

147 People (133 developers, 14 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 84% (based on 20 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 47 ratings with 6 reviews)

Classic Sci-Fi Fun

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.

DOS · by Adam Baratz (1431) · 2000

A great squad-based combat game with just one problem

The Good
This is certainly a game that I enjoyed playing, it looks like a mech game (well actually you are in a battle suit equipped with all kinds of lasers, rocket launchers and gadgets, not in a mech) and the controls are similar to most FPS in that you use the mouse to aim and shoot and use the keyboard to go in a certain direction. But you'll have to use your brains in this game, cause there are certain strategic elements like:

  • Which suit should each team member wear (heavy, medium or scout)?
  • How to outfit your suits (which weapons & gadgets)?
  • Which team members to select for the job (technicians, recon, weapon or demolition experts)?
  • Giving orders to your squad members. For instance tell them where they should go. Sometimes it is necessary to split your team into different groups and let them take different routes to certain positions. While one member is repairing something another is busy killing enemy soldiers. Instead of shooting all the time you often engage in short skirmishes.

Some other things that I like about this game:

  • Good looking outdoor environments (far horizons), but close range details are disappointing.
  • The physics modeling, gravity is different on the 3 planets.
  • B movie type of story line featuring a traitor, arguments with your brother, suspiciously acting bosses and mysterious clones
  • Those stressed voices of your teammates whenever you're under attack.



The Bad
You can't play it on modern PC's. When I bought this game I owned a 100 mhz AMD and I had no problems whatsoever running this game. A couple of years later I got a Pentium II 450 mhz and wanted to play this game again. After a flawless installation my monitor went black whenever I wanted to start a mission. The game ran and responded to input from the keyboard & mouse (I could here the sound effects). It seemed like my monitor went into the stand-by mode. Before writing this review I downloaded the demo version, the results were the same. And it's not just my PC cause Ashley Pomeroy mentions the same problem in his review.

The Bottom Line
This is a game that got great reviews when it came out (I checked Gamespot and Gamesdomain and my old magazines) but was ignored by most consumers, mainly because of the hype surrounding two FPS games called Duke 3D and Quake. If you own an old PC, go out and buy it (if you can find it). If your PC is new, play Heavy Gear II or Outwars instead. In my opinion this game is better than Quake and Duke 3D.

DOS · by Roedie (5239) · 2001

Great action, good strategy and kickass gameplay!

The Good
This is possibly the best mech-style game ever to be released. It reaches a fine balance between action and simulation which no other game in the genre has been able to do. I personally found the Mechwarrior and Heavy Gear games to be too technical and fiddly especially without the use of a fancy joystick. This detracted from my enjoyment of those games as I was concentrating more on the controls than on the game. Terra Nova has simple controls and manages to reach a remarkable level of immersion. For instance unlike other games, your squadmates aren't just back-up cannon fodder. They often have specific abilities like demolitions or electronics that are essential for the completion of missions. Furthermore there are several levels that are designed in a way that forces you to split your squad and use special tactics. In fact, almost all the levels have various ways in which you can complete them. Go in with stealthy scout suits to evade perimeter patrols or wade in with heavy armor and guns blazing, it's up to you. They even have scout probes you can launch from your suit and manually control to survey the area (a small window shows you a probe's-eye-view). Of course these drones can be shot down if they're spotted by the enemy. New weapons and defensive measures (and smarter, tougher enemies) are introduced throughout the course of the game and this ensures the combat does not get stale. Portable laser turrets and mines means you can set up ambushes in narrow passageways. I liked the way you had final control over when to detonate charges set up by you or your squadmates and had to make sure everyone was clear before you pushed the button. Innovations like this abound throughout the game.

The environments deserve a special mention because of their vastness. Each level has a huge playing area with varied terrain such as lakes, hills, mountains, cliffs and canyons. Different planets also have different gravity levels which affect jumping and falling. Some levels even have thunderstorms or snow falling!

Radio chatter between your squadmates also enhances the atmosphere.

The game didn't sell well when it was released; most blame the high system requirements for the time (a Pentium-90 when most people had 486s). No reason to worry about those now though.

The Bad
The graphics are pixelated and grainy compared to the glorious accelerated environments of the later Mechwarrior games. In fact you can only go up to a maximum of 320x400 resolution (if I remember correctly). For the time however, the graphics were exceptional.

The music and sound are also nothing exceptional however the use of the Q-sound positional audio system greatly enhances the experience.

Yes, the acting in the cutscenes is like most other games i.e. so-so but its nowhere near as bad as the worst and the videos do flesh out the characters to some extent (almost as well as the Wing Commander games).

The Bottom Line
Buy this game if you want to see how a mech game ought to be done. I still prefer it over Mechwarrior 4 (the latest in the series) mostly because of the greatly simplified yet equally satisfying control system. Of course this is my opinion and flight simulator afficiandos probably prefer the technicality of the Mech and Gear series. I haven't had any problems running this on my PII-450 with a Creative RIVA TNT2 card. Of course it's a DOS game so it all depends on the DOS drivers for your hardware or how well your system emulates that under windows (exit or boot into DOS if you can). The gameplay is incredibly addictive and the missions are varied and interesting both in their nature and their settings. Think of it as the Tie-fighter of mechgames with wing-commander style presentation as an added bonus. The best of both worlds!

DOS · by Aamir Alavi (5) · 2001

[ View all 6 player reviews ]

Trivia

Cancelled Add-on

A multiplayer add-on was planned ("Terra Nova Multi-Player Pack Coming." was written in the middle of the back of the CD booklet), although never released.

Demos

Two demos were released for Terra Nova. An early 1-mission demo with lots of missing features and a full-featured 3-mission demo later on. Interestingly enough, the 4 missions themselves do not appear in the full game and are exclusive for the demos.

Development

The development team was known as "Team Schmitty."

Ending

Upon completion of the campaign, you're shown some interesting statistics: the repair cost for your armor suit (i.e. how much damage you sustained), and the number of trees you destroyed.

Legacy

Reportedly what Looking Glass (technologies at the time) wanted to do with this game was to create an outdoors engine to complement System Shock's indoor engine and, hopefully, merge them on a third game. Was that game to be Thief: The Dark Project? Who knows...

Origin

Terra Nova apparently started out as an adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's classic sci-fi novel, Starship Troopers. However, Looking Glass were unable to get the license, so came up with their own story and intricate universe, instead. The year after Terra Nova's release, Paul Verhoeven's film version of Starship Troopers hit the cinemas.

Practical Tips

The readme file suggests (just as the bartender in the FMV does) that "mixing alcaps and water makes a great imitation martini."

Sales

Although critically acclaimed, Terra Nova was a huge commercial flop. This (together with the equally unsuccessful project of 1997, British Open Championship Golf) plunged Looking Glass in a financial crisis from which the company never recovered. Ultimately, Looking Glass had to close its doors in June 2000. (That, and Eidos was dumping $25 million into Ion Storm at the time --Ed.)

Technology

  • While the game didn't officially support VR headsets, the option was available anyway. If you had a pair of Virtual IO i-glasses!, a Forte VFX1 Headgear, or a VictorMaxx CyberMaxx, you could use it to do rudimentary head tracking.
  • It is one of the few games that supported the 320x400 alternate resolution mode. The terrain looks MUCH better in this mode.

Tom Downey

Tom Downey, the actor of Nikola ap Io, seems to stay loyal to his acting-style and had only little roles in several less know Movies like Dracula's Curse, Frankenstein Reborn and Shapeshifter but has also small appearances in That 70's Show and the computer game Code Blue.

Awards

  • Gamespot
    • One of "The top ten games you never played"


Information also contributed by Adam Baratz, Boston George, nullnullnull, Kasey Chang, Roedie, Sam Jeffreys and Zovni

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by robotriot.

Macintosh, Linux, Windows added by Sciere.

Additional contributors: nullnullnull, Terok Nor, -Chris, Kasey Chang, Adam Baratz, cafeine, Solid Flamingo, Patrick Bregger.

Game added December 3, 1999. Last modified January 29, 2024.