Frontier: First Encounters

The Good
It's big. Once patched several times, it worked. Sort of. The planned Amiga version was never released, so they weren't ripped off - I dread to imagine how incomplete, bugged and irritating that would've been

The Bad
Basing it on the initial shop release (the one you paid good money to take home, and the one you'd be stuck with for a while if you didn't have a modem (not many did at the time, there isn't a word in the dictionary to describe how bad this is. Bugs permeate constantly, making almost all the features virtually useless. As said elsewhere, the graphics are awful and many gameplay features, especially the combat, where badly designed. David Braben had a very high opinion of himself, but he should've sat back and thought "is this going to be fun to play?"

The Bottom Line
A shoddy, badly designed and rush-released fiasco

The Good
The immense universe, realistic, hand coded missions, alot of different of ships to pilot, Actually have to work to get somewhere in it., Millions of stars to explore., Can do what you want to (open ended). be a Pirate, Trader, Military, Bounty Hunter Etc., great graphics (for when it was made.) JJFFE (Google it.) Lets it run in windows with direct X support., Jades FFE Page (Google this one also.)

I've spent many evenings exploring the galaxy in this huge universe in my Imperial Explorer (my favorite ship) and I worked at it from the bottom up getting killed many times in my smaller ships, while learning the ropes for controlling and fighting the bad guys, learning the trade lanes and seeing what could be done. I've followed the missions from the beginning and until Jade's came around never finished them. With Jade's aid finally finished the missions (woooo hoo) and am working towards elite status. This is one of those games that has basically never left my hard drive since I installed it. Along with Doom, Civilization II, Total Annihilation, Master of Orion 2, Homeworld.

 If you expect to jump into the ship here and own the universe don't bother, but if you like a challenge and working towards an end in a HUGE game universe worth the effort in gaming fun.

The map and manuals are great and come with quite a bit of good imaginative fiction and are well worth the read.

See you on the Frontier, Stim

The Bad
I found Frontier and First Encounters by accident in a bargain bin and I've been an elite fan from the beginning the no advertising part stunk, not letting your fans know it's out there doesn't help.

 Initial release of the title was very buggy, but I called Gametek and was immediately sent the 1.06 remastered version which is alot more stable, so no complaints. It's still a bit buggy some of the hand coded missions still don't work right or you have to do them a particular way, basically what could've been an awesome release was killed by rushing the developer with the product out the door.

The station personnel videos are cool at first but get on your nerves after awhile .....

The Bottom Line
Open ended space simulation, be a trader, pirate, assassin, military officer. Realistic controls and space physics. Lots of different ships to own and pilot; from the lowly Saker Mark 1 to the Thargoid Warship if you can find it! Can be frustrating at first but if you learn it loads of fun.

The Good
Its the 2nd sequel to one of my all time favorites, Elite! The trading and ship upgrade options as well as the variety of ships you can pilot is quite extensive.

Unlike the other games in this series, this one does have a bit more plot that you can follow (at your option). But its still essentially an open ended game of exploration, combat and trading.

The Bad
To start the graphics are bad. The previous game, Frontier, had pretty spartan graphics but they were functional. In this game they decided to jazz up the graphics and the result is quite ugly. Its like watching a computer animated movie done by film students. You know what they were intending to do but the look is really rough and amatuerish. The best way to describe it is that it looks like a teenage girl who is trying too hard to look pretty by using too much makeup and having deep blue mascare on a pale complextion.

If you read my review of Frontier, then you know how I don't like the combat in that game. This one has improved the engine but its still quite dull and frustrating with too much empahsis on physics over fun.

The cd version has voices and some full motion video. Since this game was made in 1995 you know that this was a trendy thing to do and most of the time it was a lot of bad acting. This game is no exception, the acting is horrid and does not belong in the game, it just does not add anything to it.

Worst of all are the bugs. If you thought the tribbles were annoying in the orginal Elite then wait until you play this game. You will beg for a cargo hold of tribbles rather than put up with the crashing, freezing and graphic problems of this game. The game was unplayable in its orginal release, patches were made that will let you play it but the fact the game is full of design problems that no patch can fix doesn't help. It should not have been released in the state it was.

The Bottom Line
This game belongs with infamous titles like Battlecrusier 3000AD (another Gametek product), Starfleet II and Outpost which were buggy beta versions released as complete games on unsuspecting customers. When will publishers learn that a buggy release will only hurt game sales? Bad game collectors will like it, so everyone else should stay away. A sad sequel to a classic original game. With two duds in a row it seems that Elite co-creater Ian Bell, who was not involved in either of the sequels, was the real genius behind the making of the classic original not David "its not a bug, its a feature" Braben.