Battlecruiser Millennium Gold

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Product Details

Customer Reviews

You'll likely hate it at first, but it does grow on you.

Battlecruiser is not a game for people who don't like to have to read through scads of literature just to figure out how to move and shoot.

That said, if you don't mind having to dig through the chunky and poorly-written manual and a few online appendixes, BC can be a decently fun game. There's probably a few hundred hotkeys and commands you can give, but I've found you only really need a few of them regularly.

The premise is pretty simple. You start by creating your character, i.e. selecting a name, race, career, profession, etc. etc. Unlike some similar games, these things do actually play a major role in your experience. BC is meant to be a "realistic" simulator, so, if you decide to join up a specific military as a member of the Mobile Infantry, you're likely to have a pretty slow game stuck on a planet someplace (though you might eventually have some supercarrier drop a load of enemies on you). On the other hand, Elite Fighter Pilots are pretty much guranteed constant action; not only are you capable of taking on capital ships (at least on the easier difficulty levels), but the only thing you need to worry about besides that is keeping your ship powered and loaded with weapons. There are of course many other career choices, and you can totally ignore combat and play a trader, or a traveling medic, or whatever. The game is truely a open sandbox for whatever you want to do.

My only real complaint about the game, aside from the steep learning curve and to a lesser extent, the lack of any sort of time acceleration (loosing your hypedrive far from friendly territory is pretty much game over, as you'd expect in a "realistic scenario), is that some of the graphics, especially on planet surfaces, are just plain ugly. Still, it's an older game, so that's to be expected. It's also a little hard to fly some of the vessels without a joystick, but with a little practice, the mouse works pretty well.

All in all, it's a good game, especially for the under five dollar price and for something so old. It even runs nearly problem free on Vista, and is a good way to kill some time when you don't have anything better to do.

I Don't.......

For the Like of me have no idea why I bought this game. Too many controls and does't have a tutotial or how to in the game or maybe there is but have to press this or that. If you like simulators this is your game.

Make sure it's what you want...

Battlecruiser Millennium is a specialist game in the sense that you have to want to play it for it to be enjoyable. You start by choosing your name, sex, race, profession, asset (based on profession), gear (based on profession) and then go. Professions include star fighter pilot, capital spaceship commander, and marine. If you are a fighter pilot, you choose your fighter; if you are a capital ship commander, you choose your battlecruiser or carrier; you get the idea. There are campaigns that give you some structured missions but most go for the Roam option. Once you complete a campaign you revert to Roam in fact. The beauty of the game is that you are limited by your imagination. I say this because if you are a carrier commander you can jump into a fighter while your AI crew fights your carrier and attack your enemies in the fighter, land and jump into a shuttle and pick up some wreckage of your vanquished foe, pilot that shuttle to a planet, drive off the shuttle in your ground assault vehicle, head towards an enemy base where you dismount and lead your team of marines in for the final assault. Or you can do all this from the comfort of your command chair in your star ship with your red shirted ensign having all the fun. Or just fire your missiles from space (if you can afford them) and destroy the base that way. You are limited by your imagination and understanding of the controls. Yes, there are a lot of controls, but given everything you can do, what do you expect? Right now you will probably want to play as a fighting (military, police force, insurgent, etc) profession (caste) but with the multiplayer traders and others will be in high demand. You trade some graphics for gameplay, but are you playing the game to look at the graphic or are you playing the game to immerse yourself into a game where the sky is the limit? The graphics look good and certainly add to the feel that your marine in space is tiny compared to your ship compared to the starbase, compared to a planet... If this is the kind of game you want, you will love Battlecruiser more and more as you figure out how to play - because it will take you awhile. If you ever wanted to command a starship, pilot a fighter and shuttlecraft, drive a planetary vehicle and lead a team of marines all at the same time, this the game for you.