Wing Commander Saga

Wing Commander Saga (More commonly known as Wing Commander Saga: The Darkest Dawn) is a science fiction combat flight simulator developed and published by The Wing Commander Saga Team. It is a fan-made addition to the Wing Commander video game series and was made in the FreeSpace 2 engine. It released on March 31st, 2012 after ten years of development to acclaim from the few critics that played the game and is heavily beloved by Wing Commander fans for feeling like a true addition to the series. As of 2022, the game has recieved over 200,000 downloads.

Why It Rocks
Note: Most of the good and bad qualities of this game carry over from FreeSpace 2, so this page will only list the pros and cons that are only in this fan game.


 * 1) For a fan game, the game has amazing graphics throughout that look spectacular throughout. For starters, all of the fighters, bombers, and capital ships have tons of detail on their models, with different types of plating and even small insignias on them. Even the smallest models like missiles and mines look very good. Secondly, the space backgrounds that the players see in flight look great, with many individual stars and nebula streaks. Thirdly, there is much detail in the lighting; almost every laser blast and engine flare is reflected realistically across the models. Finally, the explosions look gorgeous, especially upon the destruction of a large ship like a carrier. Many flares shot across and spread out from them. All in all, the graphical quality is great for a fan game and even better looking than the official Wing Commander titles.
 * 2) While the game is within the confines of the FRED 2 engine (The level creator for FreeSpace 2), the creators managed to modify the engine to add some elements from the Wing Commander games to make it feel more like the official titles, with examples including.
 * 3) * Since the Wing Commander games required players to explore a large map to reach NAV points to complete objectives, this feature was added to make them as open as they were in those games rather than being confined on a smaller map. As an added bonus, we get fly-bys of the ships after entering autopilot, just like the original games and they are different depending on how many ships are with the player.
 * 4) Two different campaigns to choose from that tell the entire game's story, with the Prologue consisting of 5 missions and acting as the tutorial to the game and the main "The Darkest Dawn" campaign that consist of 50 missions, giving the players 55 total missions and giving the game a great length. As an added bonus, you can start the second campaign and get along with the story fine if you didn't play the first campaign.
 * 5) The level design is really good and stays pretty fresh despite the large mission count. Even the first mission of the The Darkest Dawn campaign starts out to look like a standard diamond patrol mission, but eventuallly gets a lot more complex. We have multiple mission types, such as the patrol, escorting defenseless capital ships, strike missions on enemy fleets, and rescue missions.
 * 6) Spectacular soundtrack. The soundtrack consists of the soundtracks from Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger and Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom and were remade to sound more film-like, with a more orchestral tone and some background vocals to create a great remake of the original soundtrack. The soundtrack also includes entirely new songs that didn't appear in the official games.
 * 7) Outside of the music, the game has a great nostalgic sound design. The original sound effects and voice clips of the weaponry, Kilrathi pilots and leaders, and target locking is exactly the same but is cleared up.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Unfortunately, the most distinguishing feature of the Wing Commander series is not in this game due to the limitations of the FRED 2 engine: the branching mission paths. In the Wing Commander games, based on your choices and how you performed you would get different missions and would continue or change to either the winning or losing path, which would lead to different endings when you beat the game. However, due to the limitations of the FRED 2 engine, the entire game is linear and there is no way to break free from the story path.
 * 2) Just like many other combat flight simulators such as the official Wing Commander games, Star Wars: X-Wing, and FreeSpace, when you fail at a mission, you have to start it all over, which can be quite a problem in this game, as some missions can be over ten minutes in length. However, this is much more prominant of a problem because this game is a lot more difficult than most games of its kind, even on the "Very Easy" difficulty. In addition, some of the missions can take 20 minutes, making this game almost unplayable at a certain point for certain players.
 * 3) The voice acting is pretty mediocre.

Reception
Upon the game's release, Wing Commander Saga was given praise from the few pulications that did cover the game. Rock, Paper, Shotgun stated that the games was a "terrific and stunning achievement". HotHardware called it "A fan-made game that's good enough to be worth paying for. It pays homage to its source material while improving on Wing Commander's classic gameplay and graphics." Gamestar called the game "A must have for nostalgic, old school gamers and space ship fans."

Trivia

 * 1) It is the only Wing Commander game, even among the other unofficial titles, to have an f-word drop.