Colony Wars

Developer: Psygnosis
Publisher:  Psygnosis

Colony Wars is a mission based space simulator, we don't really see this sort of game on consoles, but somehow the original playstation managed to be the one exception to this rule, featuring a pretty respectable number of this sort of game.

Back then I remember this being my favorite game on the system, it looked great, it sounded great, the controls were harder than most games but still easy by simulator standards and even throws a few gameplay twists to the genre.

Colony Wars places you in a war between Earth's Colonial Navy and it's colonies rebelling forces The League of Free Worlds, the story is narrated through a lot of a FMVs by what sounds like a British James Earl Jones.

It'd be nice if you could choose which faction you want to play as, but unfortunately you're stuck with the League of Free Worlds, you're also not allowed to choose what ships you want to use for each mission, instead they are picked for you, as for the missions, there's quite a bit of variety into them, they range from simple escort missions, search and destroy, full on assault, quick and nimble missions, they really put a lot of thought into them and to be fair, their choice of what ship you're allowed to use is usually the best one for the scenario, but it can still hinder your gameplay style.

The missions really epic, with a dozen fighters and a half a dozen capital ships all fighting each other in the same screen, expect to run into a lot of crossfire, luckily most of your fighters are pretty well equipped and for the most part I like the ship's designs... with the exception of the Navy's capital vessels, they're all blatant rip-offs of Star Treks' Earth ship designs, what's up with that?

The game also introduces a cool new feature, depending on what missions you succeed or fail the game's plot in the FMVs will change, as will your missions, when you succeed missions tend to get a little bit easier and the story sets a positive tone, but if you keep failing they get harder and harder as the narrator sets a real sense of struggle and urgency.

Unfortunately the game has its fair share of issues, the main one being the excessive difficulty, sometimes you don't really know what your mission objectives are, or if you do, you don't know how to achieve them, moreover, enemy capital ships are a bunch of cheap mother*censored* their main form of defense is a laser cannon that has 100% accuracy and that you have no way to take down, meaning that the stronger capital ships can probably take you down in two or three hits, finally, it's pretty cheap that your faction's capital ships are only about half as powerful as the enemy's.

Graphically the game hasn't aged well, it all looks like an early Playstation game and at times it could almost pass for a 3DO game, even the once impressive FMVs aged very poorly, the soundtrack is pretty forgettable and the voice acting ranges from good to cheesy.

The game also comes in two disks, most likely because of all the FMVs, but this poses a problem with me, if you want to change from a late mission to an early one you'll have to get up and change the disc, moreover, if you're playing at the halfway point through the game and you want to go back and re-do a certain set of missions that you keep failing, expect to get up and change the discs often.

Overall, the game is pretty decent, not as good as I remember it, the cheap difficulty level holds the game back, but the real issue is having to get up and change the discs often when you reach the game's midpoint.

Trivia: According to the game's own lore, of the five original prototypes for a Destroyer class vessel, two had faulty wiring, one was sabotaged, one was ransacked by crew suffering from 'face scab madness' fever and the last one crashed, wiping out a field of children... WHO WRITES THIS STUFF?!?

Trivia 2: Did you also know the developers had no previous experience with 3D space games at the time? Originally it was a PC centric genre (still is) and Psygnosis was keen on bringing it to the Playstation, but they wanted to simplify the standard formula, focusing on action instead of simulation.

Pros:

- Good mission variety

- Some of the missions result in huge space battles

- Branching paths is an innovative approach to the genre 

 
Cons:

- Cheap difficulty, especially when fighting capital ships

- Graphics have aged poorly, even by PS1 standards
- Expect to switch discs quite a bit during the game's mid-point
- Friendly A.I. leaves a lot to be desired 
- Why do all the enemy capital ships look like rip-offs of the Enterprise from Star Trek?

Final Score: C+

The Boxart is catchy, but way too cluttered, I have trouble understanding just what I'm supposed to be looking at and the cropped 'colony' in the background doesn't help either, if you have OCD you'll probably hate this cover.

Inside you'll find two discs and the manual, who's cover art is much cleaner, as for its contents, they're not bad, they don't really bother to tell you any backstory, though to be fair, they already do that on the disc but has all of the game's basic information.

Overall, it's an okay packaging, nothing really stands out, other than the boxart being a bit too cluttered for my taste.

Packaging Score: C