Gameplay
The first decision and one of the few facets of the game I liked was the difficulty settings, easy, medium and hard. Nothing special, true, but the strategy
guide by Mars publishing explains these settings a bit. On easy, only one enemy may fire at you at a time. Medium setting allows up to three at a time.
On hard, up to five ships can fire at you. This arrangement is handy for letting the player better judge his abilities and perhaps add to overall enjoyment
of the game.
I'm afraid I found very little to enjoy in this game. Perhaps I had too high a hope for a Privateer-like game, with its freedom of movement and exploration.
After just finishing Starlancer for the second time, I was hoping for a similar adrenaline.
The first drawback I found was that I was unable to simply launch my ship and take random jobs. In Privateer, you can earn credits for upgrades and get your
ship outfitted during random missions before taking on the storyline. In Tachyon, you are required to take a job before you are given access to your ships
and can't launch until you do. This leads into being forced into the storyline. Novalogic didn't slack in this department though. If you play both sides
of the campaign you've got a total of 74 missions and sub-missions to play.
Upgrades to weapons and systems are fairly easy to obtain, and there are a lot of them. Eleven ships, depending on which side you choose. Twenty-eight
different weapons and 18 system upgrades, 19 for multiplayer.
But I was disappointed when I found that instead being able to view all the upgrades and weapons, they are handed out piecemeal after each mission. This
makes picking a desired ship, planning what weapons you want on it and what systems to add to your "choice" ship impossible without the manual, guide or
cheats. Instead of saving for the best radar or laser, you buy what is available. Then, when you unlock something better a mission or two later, your
credits are wasted.
Upon finally launching my ship I came to what I find most annoying with this game, the cutscenes. Launch, cutscene. Autopilot to Tachyon Gate, cutscene.
Go through a Tachyon Gate, cutscene. Land, cutscene. There is no option to disable this except for the "esc" key. I used this key more than I used my
fire button on the joystick.
Once the cutscenes are out of the way, you actually get to fly around a bit and check out the scenery and graphics. Not that you can see a lot of the
scenery. The entire bottom half of your screen is nothing but ship readouts and displays. The cockpit art takes up even more space. In most of the
missions there is a very large object at the mission objective, one type of space station or another to the point of making me think that "Space" needed
more space. I felt that the environment was extremely cramped with objects to the point of overkill.
The combat on easy and medium levels was disappointing. It seemed slow and labored compared to Starlancer, Freespace II and X-Wing Alliance. The
structures of the missions weren't very exciting or seat-of-the-pants compared to the above-mentioned games. The enemy jumps in, you shoot them
down, the escort jumps out, end of mission. This may change deeper into the storyline, but by this time I honestly wasn't interested in playing that
far.
One of the enjoyable parts of the game is Bruce Campbell's voice talent. Unfortunately, some of his lines last longer than the combat does.
Numerous times I had to deal with the AI getting stuck on or ramming into, instead of flying around, the required enormous object at each mission
local. While strafing a capitol ship I decided to use my shields to take out a weapons power plant. I slammed into the ship, became stuck in it
and was unable to fly away from it. This glitch has terminated my piloting career twice, and other pilots for hire reportedly have met similar ends.
