Last Friday say the final victorious mission for Wing Commander: The Secret Missions (WC: TSM). This was the second or third time I played through this expansion, and the first time since it was a downloadable free add-on for The Kilrathi Saga. In the modern omni-present reality of paid DLC for almost every game, and even big “Season Passes” for multiple content additions for a year after the initial release, it’s easy to forget that DLC has been around for over thirty years. We just used to call it “Expansion Packs” and fork over twenty or thirty bucks for a fistful of new missions and a few more hours of adventures in our favorite games.
WC: TSM is a perfect example of that philosophy. Beginning (presumably) shortly after the end of the original Wing Commander, the plot sees the Tiger’s Claw and her crew chasing a new Kilrathi superweapon deep into enemy territory. Unlike the original game’s branching campaign which made its forty missions seem much more dynamic and plentiful than they really were, the expansions have no branching. Instead we play all the way through the campaign’s sixteen missions. Failing a system “unlocks” a pair of retreat missions, giving the campaign a grand total of eighteen. There are a couple of new capital ships to be seen, but WC: TSM adds no new flyable ships or characters to talk to.
In short, this is the epitome of the classic “If you like this game, then here’s more of it!” philosophy. Mission design seems to rely heavily on throwing more enemies at the player. It’s probably too easy to criticize this expansion in 2020, however. When it was released, it would have been exactly what players were asking for. It also helped pave the way for the somewhat more ambitious (if not imaginatively named) Wing Commander: The Secret Missions 2: Crusade. We’ll start seeing those missions on Friday.