XF-5700 "Mantis" Experimental Fighter

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Wing Commander II

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A Comparative Review

"If you liked that other space adventure, you'll love Mantis!" says the flip-down flag on the Mantis box; "No space combat game has ever been this spectacular, this dramatic," proclaims the box art. DON'T BELIEVE IT! While certainly entertaining, Mantis isn't in the same league as WCII.

General:

In Wing Commander (I and II), the player is a human being fighting the evil Kilrathi (cat people) in the future. In Mantis, the player is a human being fighting the evil Syrians (big cockroaches) in the future. In each game, a third race joins the fray for a little while. Each game consists of cinematic scenes that explain and further the storyline between space-combat scenes, which are the heart of the game.

System Requirements:

Both Mantis and WCII need heavy iron to get rolling. Though they both recommend a 12MHZ 286 and above, anything less than a 386DX/20 would be unacceptably jerky. A 386DX/33 is a good platform. Mantis will only run in 256 color mode on a VGA/MCGA system, while WCII does support 16 color EGA (but it's very ugly and not any faster). They both offer full support for just about every sound card (or compatible) you can think of, and both sell a separate "Speech Accessory Pack" that adds digitized voices to battle and various cinematic scenes if you have a Sound Blaster. They both accept keyboard, mouse, and joystick for interaction with you the user, but WCII lets you fly with the mouse as well (if you don't have a joystick, you have to fly Mantis with the keyboard).

Mantis with its Speech Pack sucks up about 22 megabytes of hard drive. You can free up 3 megabytes by deleting the introductory sequence (there's a menu option to do this within the game). WCII with its Speech Pack and the Special Operations (extra missions) add-ons takes up a little more than that (that's the full install, not the "decompress-on-the-fly" install). Considering the animations, sounds, and everything else, this is not really too obscene for either game (neither box tells you you're going to need that much space, however; you find out when you read the instructions or start the install).

Interface:

Microplay (a division of MPS Labs) apparently went to a great deal of trouble to digitize everything they could in Mantis. There are real animated, digitized people in the introduction, real digitized people in all the cinematic scenes, real digitized people in the manuals, real digitized voices from your team all during the combat scenes (that gets annoying as soon as you've heard their entire vocabulary -- which is before the end of the first battle -- because they keep repeating themselves), and real digitized-looking explosions in space. Due to the notorious amount of space occupied by digitizing animations to play on vanilla VGA hardware, however, they cut alot of corners. In the introduction, for example, it's obvious that much, if not all, of the newscaster started as a photograph (or similar video capture); with only her head moving (twitching would be more accurate), however, you don't get that "gee whiz" feeling they're shooting for. During the animated sequences thrown in (apparently at random) between battles, it looks like arbitrary stills are strung together in an amateur stop-action-photography fashion. That, combined with oversized letters in the captions (which always break clumsily in mid-sentence) are so distracting that the storyline becomes nearly impossible to follow.

Origin only digitized voices. In spite of this (or maybe because of it), the cinematic cartoons are smooth and easily followed.

A combat "session" in each game begins with a briefing given by the commanding officer, is followed by a scramble to the ship, a launch, and travel to the point of combat. For at least the first 47 sorties in Mantis (which is by no means the end, just the point at which this review was written) the player gets to see the same scramble, the same launch, and the same travel. This is bad because it's tired by the third time (even if you CAN hit [Esc] to skip it). WCII, on the other hand, keeps your character moving to different ships in different star systems with different wingmen, so you don't have to see the same scramble/launch/travel over and over. WCII's mini-movies are also longer, smoother, more exciting, and more colorful than Mantis'. The same goes for landing sequences and those unfortunate moments when your own ship blows up.

Microplay chose a menu-oriented approach to Mantis; Origin chose a "find the pixel" approach to WCII. Throughout Mantis you return to the Main Menu from which you can choose to Continue the Game, Save the Game, Change Options, etc. In WCII you are presented with a picture of whatever room you are in, with different objects in the room representing different actions you can take (click on the door to exit, click on the computer to save or load a game, etc. The message area on the bottom of the screen tells you what will happen if you click at the current mouse location). One is not necessarily better than the other, but the menu approach keeps jerking you out of the context of the game; the pixel approach keeps you involved.

Playability:

The good folks at Microplay go on at quite some length about the "realism" of Mantis over "the others." If we suspend our belief long enough to overcome the fact that there is no such thing as real space combat, we see that they are right. The flight model in Mantis probably does approximate real life high-speed space flight; frictionless inertia encourages short bursts from the engines, and changing direction is anything but easy once you're moving. The ship is difficult to navigate when you're loaded up with full weaponry and fuel but gets easier as you unload missiles and your ship loses mass. WCII, on the other hand, uses a hybrid of this "real" feeling and an "atmospheric" feeling; if you fly along at full throttle in WCII and turn your ship to follow a target, you pretty much turn and follow the target -- your inertial vector is hardly noticeable (you also drift to a dead stop if you cut your engines). That doesn't make the Mantis any more fun to fly, however. Controlling the ship is virtually impossible without the nine autopilot modes ("1" is full manual, "2" keeps you pointed at your target as you move through space, "3" attempts to fly you towards your target, etc), and once you start using them you really can't stop.

The Game:

Every so often, the WCII player is put into another kind of ship. Each ship has its own classification (light fighter, heavy cruiser, etc.) and its own "personality." Each can hold different weapons, sustain different kinds of hits, and satisfy different mission objectives. Each has its own "dashboard" and HUD layout. While this may sound distracting, it is necessary in order to accomplish the assignments given in the game (and it keeps you from getting bored). By the very nature of the game, the player in Mantis is always flying a Mantis. While it's supposed to be the cutting edge of space fighter in this game's universe, it isn't very capable and it is very fragile. Yawn.

The background "spacescape" in WCII consists of whatever star system you happen to be near, complete with planets, stars, and nebulae that hold their relative positions in the sky. The spacescape in Mantis is a spattering of 1-pixel dots (distant stars?) that move past you to give you an indication of your direction of travel. It is less than exciting and the moving dots detract from Mantis' "realism."

As I understand it, the programmers at Origin made VGA reference pictures of the various spacecraft and then proportionally model the appropriate graphic onto the screen to produce the right ship at the right angle of view, etc. The result is a consistently accurate picture of the other ships that look "painted" onto the screen. The problem with this method is that while a sense of scale is preserved, close-up views look extraordinarily blocky. Microplay chose the "draw the right polygon" path where each ship is a bunch of connected three-dimensional geometric objects. While the math involved makes it easy to draw any ship from any direction anyplace on the screen, it's butt ugly.

The XF-5700 Mantis has one offensive weapon (a mass-driver cannon that shoots little metal bullets), defensive "Point Defense Cannons" (little mass-drivers that shoot at incoming missiles), and hardpoints for attaching various missiles (of which it can carry quite a few). The different ships in WCII each have different offensive weapon(s) (coincidentally, WCII has a mass-driver cannon of its own), hardpoints for only a few missiles, and that requisite space item, regenerative shields. The Mantis pretty much flies around uncontrollably shooting missiles at everything, while WCII ships pursue targets, shooting at them with whatever weapon(s) the ship carries and firing valuable missiles only when necessary. Which is better is a matter of individual preference. I think you can tell which one I prefer.

In WCII, the path of the game is determined by how well the player does on key missions. If the player does poorly, the storyline changes appropriately. If the player does well, an entirely different story may be played out. All along there is a feeling of personal involvement in the progress of the "war" (during combat, the player can send messages to and receive messages from the enemy) and the mission briefings and cinematic "conversations" with computer characters are relevant to the story. Mantis, on the other hand, has the feeling of unrelated combat sorties stuck between unrelated mission briefings and unrelated interactions with computer characters. As an example, the appearance of the previously unknown "Berzerker" in the early stages of the Mantis game does not elicit any comment or reference from any other character for almost another twenty missions, yet the "Berzerker" is one of those omnipotent god-like beings that litter space fantasies. In another example, my character was reprimanded for not toeing the line and "pulling my own weight" by the other three members of my team after a mission in which my character single-handedly killed all 12 enemy ships.

Overall:

Don't spend your money on Mantis. That would only encourage more of the same. Go out and buy Wing Commander or, if you already have it, buy it for somebody else. That would only encourage more of the same. More "realistic" or not, Mantis isn't half the game WCII is, and no amount of posturing on MPS' part will change that. Tell a friend.