Colony Wars: Vengeance | |
---|---|
Developer(s) | Psygnosis |
Publisher(s) | Psygnosis |
Designer(s) | Mike Ellis |
Programmer(s) | Mike Anthony |
Artist(s) | Dave Crook |
Composer(s) | Stephen Murphy |
Platform(s) | PlayStation |
Release | |
Genre(s) | Space combat simulator |
Mode(s) | Single-player |
Colony Wars: Vengeance is a space combat simulator video game developed and released by Psygnosis for the PlayStation during 1998, and sequel to the original Colony Wars , released the previous year. In this game, players complete space combat missions using preselected starships equipped with various weapons. The game features multiple paths of missions and outcomes, depending on the player's performance.
The game retains the win-lose scenario styling of its predecessor, only now the player controls a pilot, Mertens, who has enlisted in the Colonial Navy.
Players do combat in mostly space missions using one of four Colonial Navy starfighters. Each starfighter carries a certain combination of energy weapons, missiles or torpedoes, and a number of units are equipped with nonlethal EMP cannons. The player can also use countermeasures to shake off inbound enemy missiles or use a grapple gun to capture targets of importance. The game introduces the ability to upgrade the starfighters' attributes in terms of engine power, maneuverability, shield capacity, and afterburner duration through points collected after every mission. The game's heads-up display also introduces a lead pursuit indicator to assist the player in targeting the enemy with cannon shots.
Missions set in planetary atmospheres are available for the first time in the series, with players getting to pilot the Navy's Spook drop ship. Some missions may involve the player facing giant League boss machines called "Sentinels".
The stages are divided into several "Acts" with a number of missions each. Multiple paths and outcomes are available throughout the game, depending on the player's performance. Completing or failing missions does not always define the ultimate success or failure of the campaign, and certain missions are turning points which can affect the game's plot.
The player's combat record is visible in the "Pilot Statistics" menu.
The game is set in 4671, a century after the events of Colony Wars . In the canonical ending, the League of Free Worlds successfully fights the Earth Empire's Colonial Navy into a last stand in the Sol system, where the Navy surprisingly holds their ground. The League pulls out all forces from the system and closes the warp hole, cutting Sol off from the universe. Now devoid of access to fresh resources as a result of the closure, the Empire degrades into civil war over the succeeding decades. Only the appearance of a man named Kron and his brand of anti-League propaganda somehow keeps the Empire together.
Mertens, the player-character, enlists in the Navy and participates in eliminating units of rogue Navy forces—called the Tribe—with his wingmen, Becks and Klein, backing him up. The Navy finally reopens the Sol warp hole and launches its opening salvo against the League; the destruction of a communications outpost allows the Navy to bring in more forces before the League can respond.
The Navy discovers that Gallonigher is no longer the League's capital and must search all systems to find and destroy the new capital. During one intense battle, the Navy is ambushed by a League ace who calls himself "The Widowmaker" and Klein is killed while saving Mertens's life.
As Kron's aggression towards the League grows more fanatical, he creates "The Watch", a secret organization designed to brutally stamp out dissent and espionage activities, with Becks becoming a member and eventually its commander. Anyone who is caught by The Watch is killed and passed off as a suicide or accidental death. Mertens consoles himself with the notion that Kron isn't aware of these atrocities, but his devotion to the leader seems to waver—even as Kron kills subordinates for the most petty of failures. He is later inducted into the group after successfully killing the Widowmaker. Mertens's missions in The Watch concern rooting out a top League spy in the Navy's ranks. As Becks escorts him to the Watch's base for trial during one mission, The Watch alerts everyone that Becks is the spy all along. Mertens kills her and Kron finally disbands the group.
As the Navy closes in on the League capital system, Boreas, a massive alien spacecraft appears during a clash between League and Navy forces and annihilates ships from both sides. It is implied that the war attracted the aliens' attention. Shocked and terrified by this turn of events, the League and Navy soon realize that they must work together to stop this new threat, but Kron is still committed to destroying the League. As a result, all but a hardened few among the Navy's rank-and-file desert him.
Mertens, who has built an impressive combat record and is recognized as one of the finest pilots from either faction, is chosen to command a joint operation to infiltrate an alien base and steal one of these starships. Data from the stolen craft is incorporated in the development of the Navy's new Voodoo advanced starship. The united League-Navy strike forces drive out the aliens from most of human-controlled space, and Mertens travels to the aliens' home system to sabotage this warpgate. With the alien menace removed and the war finally over, both the League and the Navy prepare to celebrate, but Kron has other ideas. Kron and his loyalists were planning to use a super gun to destroy the sun, in an attempt to eliminate the system. The plot failed, and Kron and a few of his loyalists tried to flee the system. In a final showdown, Mertens kills Kron and all of his loyalists.
Through information supplied by the League, the player discovers that Kron was a League ace pilot who crashed on Earth during the final assault on Sol. However, he was actually a psychopath whom the League's leader, the Father, saw as a liability and whose crash he engineered. Kron used his bitterness toward the Father to bring about the entire plot of the game.
Unlike the first game, only one 'good ending' (the story described above) can be achieved. If the player is defeated at certain points in the game, one of five 'bad endings' result:
The music played during selected pre-rendered cut scenes was taken from Symphony No. 9 (Dvořák) (specifically parts of the first movement) and The Hebrides (overture) by Felix Mendelssohn.
The game was originally announced under the title Colony Wars: Codename Vendetta. [2]
Aggregator | Score |
---|---|
GameRankings | 86.67% [3] |
PlayStation Official Magazine – UK praised the game in issue No. 39, giving it a 9/10 score and summarising with the following statement: "A great game. Buy it Now". It also received an average score of 86.67% at GameRankings, based on an aggregate of 12 reviews. [3]
In 2000 a sequel was released, named Colony Wars: Red Sun .
The TIE fighter or Twin Ion Engine fighter is a series of fictional starfighters featured in the Star Wars universe. TIE fighters are depicted as fast, agile, yet fragile starfighters produced by Sienar Fleet Systems for the Galactic Empire and by Sienar-Jaemus Fleet Systems for the First Order and the Sith Eternal. TIE fighters and other TIE craft appear in Star Wars films, television shows, and throughout the Star Wars expanded universe. Several TIE fighter replicas and toys, as well as a TIE flight simulator, have been produced and sold by many companies.
The Rebel Alliance is a fictional organization in the Star Wars franchise. The Alliance is portrayed as a stateless coalition of rebel dissidents and defectors who oppose the Galactic Empire and its authoritarian rule. Its stated goal is to restore the liberal governance of the previous Galactic Republic, which had been dissolved after its leader Palpatine seized absolute power and declared himself emperor. It is the main protagonistic faction of the original Star Wars trilogy, along with the mostly fallen Jedi Order.
Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War, known as Conflict: FreeSpace – The Great War in Europe, is a 1998 space combat simulation IBM PC compatible computer game developed by Volition, when it was split off from Parallax Software, and published by Interplay Productions. In 2001, it was ported to the Amiga platform as FreeSpace: The Great War by Hyperion Entertainment. The game places players in the role of a human pilot, who operates in several classes of starfighter and combats against opposing forces, either human or alien, in various space-faring environments, such as in orbit above a planet or within an asteroid belt. The story of the game's single player campaign focuses on a war in the 24th century between two factions, one human and the other alien, that is interrupted in its fourteenth year by the arrival of an enigmatic and militant alien race, whose genocidal advance forces the two sides into a ceasefire in order to work together to halt the threat.
Renegade Legion is a series of science fiction games that were designed by Sam Lewis, produced by FASA, and published from 1989 to 1993. The line was then licensed to Nightshift games, a spin-off of the garage company Crunchy Frog Enterprises by Paul Arden Lidberg, which published one scenario book, a gaming aid, and three issues of a fanzine-quality periodical before reverting the license.
FreeSpace 2 is a 1999 space combat simulation computer game developed by Volition as the sequel to Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War. It was completed ahead of schedule in less than a year, and released to very positive reviews, but the game became a commercial failure, and was described by certain critics as one of 1999's most unfairly overlooked titles.
Star Hero is a science fiction role-playing game published by Hero Games and Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE) in 1989. The game uses the Hero System rules also used in other Hero Games publications such as Champions and Danger International.
Star Wars: X-wing is a ten-book series of Star Wars novels by Michael A. Stackpole and Aaron Allston. Stackpole's contributions cover the adventures of a new Rogue Squadron formed by Wedge Antilles, while Allston's focus on Antilles' Wraith Squadron.
Warhead is a 3D space combat simulator for Amiga and Atari ST platforms. It was created by British developer Glyn Williams in 1989.
Darklight Conflict is a space combat simulator video game developed by Rage Software and published by Electronic Arts in 1997 for the MS-DOS, and the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation game consoles. Players take on the part of a contemporary human fighter pilot abducted by the alien Repton species during an aerial battle, and biologically modified to become a starfighter pilot for them in their war against the Evil Ovon race.
Star Wars: Starfighter is a 2001 action video game, developed and published by LucasArts, that takes place right before the Battle of Naboo. The player unites alongside three starfighter pilots and is allowed to take control of several different spacecraft to help stop the invasion that threatens Naboo.
Star Trek: Klingon Academy is a space flight simulator video game developed by 14 Degrees East, an internal development house of publisher Interplay Entertainment. The game follows a young Klingon warrior named Torlek as he attends the Elite Command Academy, a war college created by General Chang to prepare warriors for a future conflict with the United Federation of Planets. Christopher Plummer and David Warner reprised their respective roles as Chang and Gorkon for the production of Klingon Academy.
Starship Catan is a two-player card game, loosely based on the Starfarers of Catan board game. As a member of the Catan family of games, it is designed by Klaus Teuber, and distributed by Kosmos in German and Mayfair Games in English.
The planetary systems of stars other than the Sun and the Solar System are a staple element in many works of the science fiction genre.
StarWraith is a series of space combat simulators by StarWraith 3D Games.
Colony Wars is a space combat simulator video game for the PlayStation developed and released by Psygnosis in 1997. Players complete space combat missions using preselected starfighters equipped with various weapons. The game features multiple paths of missions and outcomes, depending on the player's performance. It was followed by Colony Wars: Vengeance in 1998, and Colony Wars: Red Sun in 2000.
Colony Wars: Red Sun is a space combat simulator video game for the PlayStation developed by Psygnosis and published by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and Midway Games in 2000. It is a sequel to Colony Wars in 1997 and Colony Wars: Vengeance in 1998. Instead of being a starfighter pilot for the League of Free Worlds or the Colonial Navy, the player now assumes the role of a civilian miner-turned-mercenary.
Star Wars: TIE Fighter is a 1994 Star Wars space flight simulator and space combat video game, a sequel in the Star Wars: X-Wing series. It places the player in the role of an Imperial starfighter pilot during events that occur between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
Star Wars: X-Wing is a series of space flight simulator video games based in the Star Wars media franchise that attempts to simulate the fictional experience of starfighter combat, while remaining faithful to the movies. The player took the role of a pilot of the Rebel Alliance, and, in later games, the Galactic Empire. To complete the games, players must complete missions such as simple dogfights with opposition starfighters, reconnaissance and inspection tasks, escort duty for freighters or capital ships, or attacks on larger opposition ships. In addition to dogfighting designed to resemble the free-wheeling duels of World War I, the games also offered the challenge of managing power resources and wingmen, and using weapons effectively.