This is the final game Origin released in 1993 that I’ve still to play and was the one and only add-on pack released for Strike Commander. I’m going into this knowing what I’m going to get – more of the same. There are no new weapons, no new planes and as far as I know no new overall storyline although there must be story for each campaign. This makes this add-on basically a set of standalone campaigns like all the optional ones from the original game.

The last thing Strike Commander needed was more of the same as there was too much of that in the original game for my liking. With the epic scale of Serpent Isle it seems like a while since I played Strike Commander though so I’m actually keener than I expected to start this and there are only 21 new missions so it shouldn’t take that long to complete.

I can’t imagine that a load of similar missions with no plot is going to give me a lot to write about so these could be some short posts.

The game starts sixth months after the last one. The wildcats have been on holiday and are just returning back to duty. Virgil informs me that Turkey are putting taxes through the roof and we need to find some work. The first two missions involve taking out Turkish training bases where pilots are being prepared to enforce the new taxes.

I get to fly the F22 again in the first of these missions – the starting difficulty is a lot harder as you would expect from a mission pack but otherwise they are just the sort of thing I saw in the first game.
 
 

We wipe out the training bases, but we still need money as these missions were unpaid and we probably need to relocate before the  taxes are enforcable. I go to Selims to find a job and Prideaux is still hanging around and in business.

I only have the one job to choose from which is helping the South Africans in some border conflicts. Again for the first of these missions I get to fly the F22. The jackals appear to be supporting the opposition so we decide to take their base out in mission 2. I can tell somethings going on here when I don’t get to choose my wingman. Instead Lyle joins me at at nav 1 only to get killed by the Jackals later in the mission.

The mission is aborted at this point but we get revenge in the next one by blowing up the Jackals base.

Thats as far as I got for now. After thinking the change from Serpent Isle would be fun, I’m pretty unenthusiastic now I’ve started. It looks like there may be a reasonable plot to the game after all but the missions are just the same thing all over again and I’m pretty bored with them already. In short, if I wasn’t doing this blog, there is no way I’d bother playing this game.

I guess you could level the same complaint at the Wing Commander games but I simply find Wing Commander more fun to play than this + there is a little more variety in my opinion. I’ll stick with it but I’m not going to enjoy this one especially – it will probably be a case of picking off a few missions at a time until its done. Its only taken an hour or so to do 1/4 of the game so unless the difficulty level goes through the roof I should still finish this one up by the end of the week.