Retro ReView – Wing Commander II

Last week, my YouTube channel published the final video in my Let’s Play series for Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi with the final bad ending mission for Special Operations 2. I’m far from done playing in the Wing Commander universe, but the overall series is going to detour through the side games that Origin released in between finishing up WC2 and launching the drastically retooled Wing Commander III.

Wing Commander II is an interesting game for me. I’ve played through it a couple of times previously, but never with the kind of full deep dive that I did for this LP. It places a greater emphasis on the overall story, and puts the player’s character (“Blue Hair”) squarely in the center of the narrative.

The game introduces some new mechanics (torpedoes, stealth ships, turrets on fighters) that will play reoccurring elements throughout the rest of the series, and de-emphasizes a few things from the first game, such as receiving medals for your performance. It takes away most of the characters you grew to know from the first game, introduces a new cast of mostly likeable wingmen, and throws in a love interest side plot that at the very least makes more sense in this game than it does in Wing Commander III.

It introduced speech for some of the cutscenes, but doesn’t go as far as Privateer, where a speech expansion pack would give every character a voice.

For nostalgia reasons alone, Wing Commander II doesn’t hold nearly the place in my mind as Wing Commander. I do think that overall, Wing Commander II is a better game, and it’s structured in a way that players could easily pick it up without any knowledge of the first game. The mechanics are more polished, the game engine is prettier, and the story is bigger.