I had this whole great opening written in which I bitched and
moaned about how I've been reviewing nothing but pure and
unadulterated crap recently. I then planned to make some
reference to Deep Fighter forming a trifecta of crap with Galaga
and Recon, or maybe being the meat in a crap sandwich, and then
smoothly transitioning into the review itself. I couldn't get away
with it though because, not only is Deep Fighter not crap, it
happens to be one of the best games I've personally reviewed for
Game Over Online. Does it deserve a Gamer's Choice Award?
I've been giving that some thought and came to the conclusion
that the answer is probably not because its appeal is limited to a
certain segment of gamers. If you have been looking for a combat
flight sim with a twist, though, Deep Fighter is just the thing. Great
graphics, sound, physics, some plot - it's got it all.
'Wing Commander underwater' - that was my first impression as I
began playing Deep Fighter. As I played it some more, differences
began to crop up, but the similarities far outnumbered the
differences. So, for those of you with short attention spans or who
don't care for my distinct brand of rambling, you can simply read
'Wing Commander underwater,' glance at the rating at the top of
the page, and go read something else on the site - that's 95% of the
story. For those of you who are left, both of you, I shall now
elaborate.
This whole game takes place underwater (no kidding), but it's not
a deep and featureless ocean scoured clean of all sea life (like NY
Harbor)- this looks more like SCUBA diving in the Caribbean.
Mostly the water is shallow, merely a couple of hundred meters
deep, and you can always see the surface or the bottom or
frequently both. Some areas are like small rivers that aren't deep
enough even to cover your entire sub with water. The whole
place is teeming with life: various fish and crabs, insects and
plants - Hey, I'm playing Wing Commander in an aquarium! In
what is now a rather familiar formula to gamers everywhere, you
get a mission briefing, and then go out and do the mission, the
objectives of which are sometimes modified through scripted
events. Complete the mission and move on; die and you have to
go back and try it again. If you fail some of the mission objectives,
the mission tree continues (I don't believe it forks), but I think later
missions become more difficult because of it. I'm not entirely
certain about that. Frankly I haven't completed this game yet,
which is something I usually like to do before writing a review, but
Deep Fighter has so many missions it will probably be Xmas
before I'll get it done. I know how far along I am because the
object of the entire game is to complete a mothership of sorts to
take your people to somewhere nicer, and when you load a game
it tells you what percentage of the mothership was completed in
your last save. Anyway, I've failed some missions and the game
and the plot are still moving along, so I don't exactly know the
penalty for failure. Also, the game autosaves after each mission so
it's a little difficult to go back and try different pass/fail mission
alternatives.
The things that make it seem so much like Wing Commander are
the missions themselves. Go out and destroy enemy subs. Escort
this vehicle to that location. Go investigate that area. See? There
are some other types of missions (mine some minerals, a race
against other sub pilots, stock a fish farm), but once I had the WC
metaphor in my head I couldn't shake it. You even sometimes
have wingmen like in WC, and just as in WC they are pretty much
clueless. If Deep Fighter had a kill board, I think it would show the
usual 300 kills for me, 10 for them, but it doesn't. Also absent is the
boasting of the WC wingmen. Long live the Maniac. Another
interesting deviation from the WC formula is the inclusion of, I
can't think of a better way to describe them, boss levels. Some
missions pit you against a giant something - jellyfish, fly, electric
eel. These levels are a little frustrating as you need to figure out
how to kill the boss, what its weak point is, and it can take you a
bunch of tries, and you have to keep doing the mission up to that
point over and over. The kind of thing that makes you want to yell
at your computer "Why won't that f**ker die?!?" I'm sure it's
something with which each and every one of you is excruciatingly
familiar.
You fly a single-man combat submersible (think: The Abyss with
guns). For an underwater craft it's pretty maneuverable, but the
whole pace of the game is a little slower than the typical combat
flight sim. Buoyancy, sink, float, drift - it's all in there, and the
underwater physics engine is absolutely the best I've ever seen.
As the mission tree proceeds you get the opportunity to fly different
crafts of varying capabilities with multiple weapon systems. The
enemies consist of various hostile sea life forms and an enemy
race called the Shadowkin, but the weapon systems don't seem to
recognize the sea life as hostile, so gun emplacements won't fire
on them and guided torpedoes won't lock. That seems like a
pretty major oversight on the part of your weapons manufacturer,
especially when a barracuda-like creature is gnoshing on your
sub. While I'm on the subject, the weapons are wildly
misbalanced. The guided torpedoes are fast, highly
maneuverable, pretty much never miss, and two can destroy
almost any enemy sub that I've run across. By comparison, The
energy cannon is completely unguided and takes a dozen or more
hits to destroy the enemy. While you acquire more damaging
guns later in the game, the guided capability can't be beat even
with the additional lock-on time required for the guidance to work.
Since you get to choose your weapon loadout, never leave the
dock without a pack of guided torpedoes; but of course, they won't
help you with the angry crabs. There's an oddity - you're in this
high-tech, one-man sub loaded with weapons, but crabs and fish
are a serious threat to you. How strange is that?
This game is beautiful, not the Ground Control level of wow, but
very good looking. The fish are swimming around, rays of sunlight
shine from the surface and cast beams in the water, crabs skitter
across the ocean floor, and the propellers from your sub and
others churn up bubbles. Driving around during one mission it got
darker (presumably sunset), and then there was a sort of silvery
light from the moon. I should have surfaced and given it a look,
but I didn't. Probably my loss. At extreme depth, the only light is
from luminescent plants, fish, and the lights on your sub. The area
lighting is extremely well done (I really can't stress that enough)
with pools of light near the creatures and beams of light from you.
In all the graphics I saw only two weak points - boulders looks
oddly too perfectly spherical, and subs kind of explode a little and
break apart when they die, but some sort of implosion graphic
would have been much cooler. Sounds are sort of distant and
echo-y, but that's probably what sounds outside a sub sound like to
someone inside of it. That's a layman's guess - I've never been in
a sub. As a whole, the graphics and sounds combine nicely to
make me feel like a man in a can. In one mission I went too deep
for my sub, and my windows started cracking under the pressure. I
swear, I felt my ears pop. That's a gaming experience!