My dad gifted me one of these ten-games-collection big boxes for Mac when I was around 8 or 9. Cannot fully trace it back. Probably one of the most formative and important presents I have ever received, for that collection contained not only several Creative Reader titles like Peter Pan and The Jungle Book but also System Shock, Super Wing Commander and Wing Commander 3. There were other games, but I do not recall.
The Shock game was too complicated and scary for a non-english speaking German child and I only appreciated it a few years later... but the Wing Commander games, they clicked with me hard and thus began a life-long love with the genre and those games in particular. I vividly remember figuring out that the game could be saved after an undertimed but surely length amount of months 😇. For years on end, these two games were on my regular list and I was so, so so proud when I first finished one of them.
I only played WC4 years later, that one is hard to place exactly on the timeline. I know that it was after Freespace 2 and after that went OpenSource, hence I was probably 16 or something. It had of course lost its wow-factor but I still liked it quite a lot and replayed it numerous times over the next decade.
WCP on the other hand, I finished exactly once.
The reasons for that are hard to figure out. I do remember finishing the game and being both very enterained and satisfied, but I also clearly remember several disappointments along the way with that particular title.
The fact that I have only played that campaign once is doubley weird because I have probably spent more Wing Commander-time in this engine during the last 20 years (ignoring the Freespace engine and my involvement in WC: Saga) than any other of the games.
While I only finished Secret Ops once as well, I remember often playing just one or two missions for years to unwind, similar to how I often put on Quake or Doom nowadays. And, of course, I loved Standoff and played through most of the episodes at least 4 times.
It is easy to see why the WCP-engine was alluring, prior to the recent enhancement patches by Mash, WCP was the only Wing Commander game you could run in higher resolutions and framerates. Also, it is capable of supporting larger dogfights and scenarios, and features the most interesting vocal soundscape as I have always loved the hollywood-style combat chatter in that game.
In Octover 2025, I decided to start my second-ever full playthrough of WCP. I was incredibly curious how my half-remembered feelings and oppinions on this game would change, because it is the only content-rich WC-game I never played to death, the one I cannot vividly recall pretty much every detail of at will.
Having just finished it, this lengthy write up brings us to...
WCP half a life later
The game's particular mechanics are of course burned into my brain from playing a lot in this engine. Ignoring that, I remembered the following about WCP :
1.) the story and writing being good and going for a darker, somewhat cthulhu-like tone
2.) cutscenes being a regular occurance in the early game and then gradually disappearing later
3.) the wingmen being likeable
4.) the ludonarrative dissonance between my killboard score and Casey being treated as a rookie by way to many people
5.) the Kilrathi can be your allies or not arc with Hawk
6.) the shipkiller and wormhole, as well as the loosing path were you are pushed into Confed territory
7.) the fact that the supercarrier Midway-thing did not make too much sense and that even some of the characters talk about it at some point
8.) missions being a lot longer than in previous games
Let's go through these in order, now that I have replayed the game half a life later.
1.) Story and Writing
Let's not beat around this bush, this is a mess. While the tone is darker overall, at least half of the game suffers from either tonal whiplash, or worse, being utterly disjointed: In contrast to WC3 and 4, many elements constructed out of individual leftover lines or scenes.
There are big scenes that go nowhere, like the one with Blair not wanting to be grounded, telling Casey in a dramatic fashion that he has to do something no matter what the CAG says, zipping is flightsuit ready to disobey orders and jump into action and then nothing and we forget about it. There are important characters, like Dallas and Hawk, who have a lot of scenes, and then they just die without interesting drama around it and the story is incapable of acknowledging that properly or dealing with it sensibly. There are so, so many lines of characters that state things or refer to things which were never actually introduced... Great, you found the second ship killer. What? There is a second shipkiller? We were searching for one? Or suspecting one? Everything related to the capture of the alien shipkiller is particularly outragous, because we never capture it but actually blow it up. Then, we suddenly have a big crystal between the Midway's arms, Casey has a single line about our new plasma weapons and it is only a few missions later that we do learn more in the briefing.
And regarding tonal whiplash, I only need to quote Maestro talking about his penis using the words I have a big gun, a happy gun in the middle of an otherwise normal conversation. Enough said there.
2.) Cutscene Frequency
This turned out to be correct. The game feels like several exposition-heavy scenes are completely missing. Many key plot points, such as the alien gate or even just the aliens itself, never get sensible exposition and what is going one must be inferred in hindsight (like the Devereaux's black box being picked up in one mission). At about half the game, the "optional" cutscenes in the bar simply cease to exist.
A lot of very important key plot points competely lack cutscenes and the player is simply kept in the dark. There is never a briefing on what we know thus far or about Blair's debrief after his recovery.
The entire second half of the game lacks any conversation with our wingmen about how they are feeling, what they think of a certain situation, and the whatnot. Essentially, the game's actual story stops after Hawk dies and from here on out, it is only gameplay and individual fragments of a plot.
I'd love a write-up by Bandit LOAF (or someone knowledgeable) about what we know of WCP's development. Were they rushed, did they have to cut corners or stop filming? Was there a lot more in the script or did they simply decide to only uphold the WC-standard for the early game because that was all they could pay for?
3.) Liking the wingmen
I still love the chatter and pretty much all the performances when it comes to the voicelines in combat 😌. Some are full of ham, some are earnest, and Maestro in particular is great and up the the task. In-game, he really is great. But even the pilots outside of the main cast are great, distinct, memorable and most of all, fun.
So, one can love the wingmen for their particular sticks and lines. But aside from that, the four main people in the story, Stiletto, Zero, Maestro and Casey, remain pretty unknowable. Nothing of real note happens and, with them essentially disappearing due to the lack of cutscenes later, I'd argue that one does not really learn much about these characters and they therefore barely feel like characters.
4.) Kill Board and Ludonarrative Dissonance
Yeah. Utterly.
Video game plots should never put the player in the shoes of the rookie unless the player's performance is indeed guaranteed to be worse that the one of other characters. By the way, WC: Saga also made that mistake and I did not like it. Gameplay performance must either be recognized or, that is the usual way, the player is cast as the chosen one and savior of all.
5.) Kilrathi
These were even more fun than I remember. Suddenly, after a long time playing "the new game", the old one is reintroduced for a brief time. Loved it.
6.) Shipkillers
I remembered the captial ship mechanics to be the most interesting in the series, and I remembered correctly. Still not great though, it was a lot easier to take down captial vessels than I remembered and destroying turrets was never necessary (unless I wanted to keep more allies alive).
What I did not remember was the fact that the game undermines its own mechanics later on with the Devestator's plasma gun, which damages subsystems and makes torpedos utterly irrelevant. As it is way safer to be close to a capship than further away for a variety of reasons, the late game suddenly became very trivial and I completed many of the capital ship assaults in record time.
Now, super-ships of course are a WC-staple. But this particular one was interested because it essentially nullified an entire mechanic of the game. The entire last two systems were much easier and quicker to play through than anything that came before.
7.) The Midway
The scene I recalled happened a bit later than I thought, but it was there. But that is not really what I want to talk about😉.
The Midway starts out essentially unprepared, defending against an unknown threat and aiming to retreat and alert the rest of the fleet. That part of the story works.
Then, we somewhere loose the fact that the carrier is not combat-ready and the ship goes on the offensive. But due to (1) and (2), there is never a stated goal, communicated strategy or else, the player has little to no idea what to achieve besides kill more aliens. WC3 and 4 are so, so much better in this regard.
8) Mission Length
WCP does move towards more gameplay time, compared to all the mainline WC games before it. We always had roughly the same amount of time talking and getting briefed, then flying and fighting. I have always loved this, 2 to 5 minutes of story and 2 to 5 minutes of gameplay. I have loved it as a kid and I still love it as a very busy adult. Honestly, I wished more games used exactly that model, because it also gives you regular exit points to pause or end.
WCP has longer missions, ignoring many of the late game ones. And, I think, a lot are too long and too same-y, especially in the early game. One faces lots of similar baddies in similar situations. I feel they are trying to Tie-Fighter-ify or Freespace-ify Wing Commander but without the complexity in the mission design. The later is good, because they also lack the player tools required for that and often even regress compared to earlier games.
Consider escort missions in WCP: There is no effective way of quickly checking on the vessel you need to protect, not even the request status works because it is not available most of the time (only available when you have found and selected the target, at which point you have your answers).
There are also attempts at other mission activities, like scanning objects while racing Stiletto, or baiting and retreating, but they are all poorly explained at best and not supported by the gameplay systems or the AI at worst.
While the core combat gameplay remains fun as hell and the dogfights are probably at their best in this game, I feel WCP is overall simply unpolished in its mission design and gameplay toolset. It reminds me a bit of Call of Duty, a series that still adheres to inherited gameplay mechanics that were designed to make it hard to survive a situation while nowadays aiming to be a power fantasy.
WCP is a bit like that, trying to transplant Wing Commander into a busier, more complex gameplay environment without adjusting itself enough.
Conclusion)
While I had a lot of fun again thanks to a stellar central gameplay loop, this game really is a mess ☺️.
I know understand why this game never had the allure of the others, while it failed to draw me back in.
I'd love to hear your feelings.
The Shock game was too complicated and scary for a non-english speaking German child and I only appreciated it a few years later... but the Wing Commander games, they clicked with me hard and thus began a life-long love with the genre and those games in particular. I vividly remember figuring out that the game could be saved after an undertimed but surely length amount of months 😇. For years on end, these two games were on my regular list and I was so, so so proud when I first finished one of them.
I only played WC4 years later, that one is hard to place exactly on the timeline. I know that it was after Freespace 2 and after that went OpenSource, hence I was probably 16 or something. It had of course lost its wow-factor but I still liked it quite a lot and replayed it numerous times over the next decade.
WCP on the other hand, I finished exactly once.
The reasons for that are hard to figure out. I do remember finishing the game and being both very enterained and satisfied, but I also clearly remember several disappointments along the way with that particular title.
The fact that I have only played that campaign once is doubley weird because I have probably spent more Wing Commander-time in this engine during the last 20 years (ignoring the Freespace engine and my involvement in WC: Saga) than any other of the games.
While I only finished Secret Ops once as well, I remember often playing just one or two missions for years to unwind, similar to how I often put on Quake or Doom nowadays. And, of course, I loved Standoff and played through most of the episodes at least 4 times.
It is easy to see why the WCP-engine was alluring, prior to the recent enhancement patches by Mash, WCP was the only Wing Commander game you could run in higher resolutions and framerates. Also, it is capable of supporting larger dogfights and scenarios, and features the most interesting vocal soundscape as I have always loved the hollywood-style combat chatter in that game.
In Octover 2025, I decided to start my second-ever full playthrough of WCP. I was incredibly curious how my half-remembered feelings and oppinions on this game would change, because it is the only content-rich WC-game I never played to death, the one I cannot vividly recall pretty much every detail of at will.
Having just finished it, this lengthy write up brings us to...
WCP half a life later
The game's particular mechanics are of course burned into my brain from playing a lot in this engine. Ignoring that, I remembered the following about WCP :
1.) the story and writing being good and going for a darker, somewhat cthulhu-like tone
2.) cutscenes being a regular occurance in the early game and then gradually disappearing later
3.) the wingmen being likeable
4.) the ludonarrative dissonance between my killboard score and Casey being treated as a rookie by way to many people
5.) the Kilrathi can be your allies or not arc with Hawk
6.) the shipkiller and wormhole, as well as the loosing path were you are pushed into Confed territory
7.) the fact that the supercarrier Midway-thing did not make too much sense and that even some of the characters talk about it at some point
8.) missions being a lot longer than in previous games
Let's go through these in order, now that I have replayed the game half a life later.
1.) Story and Writing
Let's not beat around this bush, this is a mess. While the tone is darker overall, at least half of the game suffers from either tonal whiplash, or worse, being utterly disjointed: In contrast to WC3 and 4, many elements constructed out of individual leftover lines or scenes.
There are big scenes that go nowhere, like the one with Blair not wanting to be grounded, telling Casey in a dramatic fashion that he has to do something no matter what the CAG says, zipping is flightsuit ready to disobey orders and jump into action and then nothing and we forget about it. There are important characters, like Dallas and Hawk, who have a lot of scenes, and then they just die without interesting drama around it and the story is incapable of acknowledging that properly or dealing with it sensibly. There are so, so many lines of characters that state things or refer to things which were never actually introduced... Great, you found the second ship killer. What? There is a second shipkiller? We were searching for one? Or suspecting one? Everything related to the capture of the alien shipkiller is particularly outragous, because we never capture it but actually blow it up. Then, we suddenly have a big crystal between the Midway's arms, Casey has a single line about our new plasma weapons and it is only a few missions later that we do learn more in the briefing.
And regarding tonal whiplash, I only need to quote Maestro talking about his penis using the words I have a big gun, a happy gun in the middle of an otherwise normal conversation. Enough said there.
2.) Cutscene Frequency
This turned out to be correct. The game feels like several exposition-heavy scenes are completely missing. Many key plot points, such as the alien gate or even just the aliens itself, never get sensible exposition and what is going one must be inferred in hindsight (like the Devereaux's black box being picked up in one mission). At about half the game, the "optional" cutscenes in the bar simply cease to exist.
A lot of very important key plot points competely lack cutscenes and the player is simply kept in the dark. There is never a briefing on what we know thus far or about Blair's debrief after his recovery.
The entire second half of the game lacks any conversation with our wingmen about how they are feeling, what they think of a certain situation, and the whatnot. Essentially, the game's actual story stops after Hawk dies and from here on out, it is only gameplay and individual fragments of a plot.
I'd love a write-up by Bandit LOAF (or someone knowledgeable) about what we know of WCP's development. Were they rushed, did they have to cut corners or stop filming? Was there a lot more in the script or did they simply decide to only uphold the WC-standard for the early game because that was all they could pay for?
3.) Liking the wingmen
I still love the chatter and pretty much all the performances when it comes to the voicelines in combat 😌. Some are full of ham, some are earnest, and Maestro in particular is great and up the the task. In-game, he really is great. But even the pilots outside of the main cast are great, distinct, memorable and most of all, fun.
So, one can love the wingmen for their particular sticks and lines. But aside from that, the four main people in the story, Stiletto, Zero, Maestro and Casey, remain pretty unknowable. Nothing of real note happens and, with them essentially disappearing due to the lack of cutscenes later, I'd argue that one does not really learn much about these characters and they therefore barely feel like characters.
4.) Kill Board and Ludonarrative Dissonance
Yeah. Utterly.
Video game plots should never put the player in the shoes of the rookie unless the player's performance is indeed guaranteed to be worse that the one of other characters. By the way, WC: Saga also made that mistake and I did not like it. Gameplay performance must either be recognized or, that is the usual way, the player is cast as the chosen one and savior of all.
5.) Kilrathi
These were even more fun than I remember. Suddenly, after a long time playing "the new game", the old one is reintroduced for a brief time. Loved it.
6.) Shipkillers
I remembered the captial ship mechanics to be the most interesting in the series, and I remembered correctly. Still not great though, it was a lot easier to take down captial vessels than I remembered and destroying turrets was never necessary (unless I wanted to keep more allies alive).
What I did not remember was the fact that the game undermines its own mechanics later on with the Devestator's plasma gun, which damages subsystems and makes torpedos utterly irrelevant. As it is way safer to be close to a capship than further away for a variety of reasons, the late game suddenly became very trivial and I completed many of the capital ship assaults in record time.
Now, super-ships of course are a WC-staple. But this particular one was interested because it essentially nullified an entire mechanic of the game. The entire last two systems were much easier and quicker to play through than anything that came before.
7.) The Midway
The scene I recalled happened a bit later than I thought, but it was there. But that is not really what I want to talk about😉.
The Midway starts out essentially unprepared, defending against an unknown threat and aiming to retreat and alert the rest of the fleet. That part of the story works.
Then, we somewhere loose the fact that the carrier is not combat-ready and the ship goes on the offensive. But due to (1) and (2), there is never a stated goal, communicated strategy or else, the player has little to no idea what to achieve besides kill more aliens. WC3 and 4 are so, so much better in this regard.
8) Mission Length
WCP does move towards more gameplay time, compared to all the mainline WC games before it. We always had roughly the same amount of time talking and getting briefed, then flying and fighting. I have always loved this, 2 to 5 minutes of story and 2 to 5 minutes of gameplay. I have loved it as a kid and I still love it as a very busy adult. Honestly, I wished more games used exactly that model, because it also gives you regular exit points to pause or end.
WCP has longer missions, ignoring many of the late game ones. And, I think, a lot are too long and too same-y, especially in the early game. One faces lots of similar baddies in similar situations. I feel they are trying to Tie-Fighter-ify or Freespace-ify Wing Commander but without the complexity in the mission design. The later is good, because they also lack the player tools required for that and often even regress compared to earlier games.
Consider escort missions in WCP: There is no effective way of quickly checking on the vessel you need to protect, not even the request status works because it is not available most of the time (only available when you have found and selected the target, at which point you have your answers).
There are also attempts at other mission activities, like scanning objects while racing Stiletto, or baiting and retreating, but they are all poorly explained at best and not supported by the gameplay systems or the AI at worst.
While the core combat gameplay remains fun as hell and the dogfights are probably at their best in this game, I feel WCP is overall simply unpolished in its mission design and gameplay toolset. It reminds me a bit of Call of Duty, a series that still adheres to inherited gameplay mechanics that were designed to make it hard to survive a situation while nowadays aiming to be a power fantasy.
WCP is a bit like that, trying to transplant Wing Commander into a busier, more complex gameplay environment without adjusting itself enough.
Conclusion)
While I had a lot of fun again thanks to a stellar central gameplay loop, this game really is a mess ☺️.
I know understand why this game never had the allure of the others, while it failed to draw me back in.
I'd love to hear your feelings.
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