The obvious question after wrapping up a long LP like Wing Commander II is “what’s next?” As I hinted previously, the answer for me isn’t going to be moving directly onto Wing Commander III, but instead to take a few detours through Origin’s experimental entries into the Wing Commander universe.
First up is Wing Commander Academy. This is a probably the weirdest one of the bunch, a full priced game that is barely more than a mission builder. Honestly, if I’d walked out of Babbage’s with this back in 1993 expecting a new chapter in the Wing Commander saga, I would probably have been pretty upset. What you got for your money was one new flyable ship, the Wraith, a single gauntlet set of missions that could be flown with any of the available fighters, and a mission builder with twenty-four save slots where you could build your own missions and share the files with your friends.
This isn’t a full game, it’s an expansion pack at full price. The more things change in this business sometimes…
The Wraith is a fun super fighter, faster than anything else in the game, and armed with a new type of gun and a solid all around missile armament. It would have been a fun fighter to take into battle during an actual WC2 campaign. It’s certainly better than WC2:SO2’s Morningstar.
The Gauntlet, too, is fun, but severely limited. It’s just wave after wave of enemy fighters, until you’re either destroyed, or complete all the waves. It’s a nice challenge, but wears out its welcome pretty quickly. Again, broke teenager me would have probably played through it with every ship in the game because I had nothing better to do, but tired middle-aged me has better things to move on to after getting a taste.
The mission builder is the thing that makes Academy special. Because you can share missions with friends, and because the internet was a nascent thing back in the mid-90s, savvy players could and did create whole campaigns and share them via floppy disks, BBS boards, and even painfully slow downloads from webpages. A few of the best packages were even scooped up and bundled into retail CDROMs containing a bunch of expansion missions and levels for various games.
In the end, it’s a game that’s worth picking up for cheap on GOG for completionist fans, but not one that I wanted to spend much time with. Mostly I wanted to move on to Wing Commander Privateer, which I’d never played before.