Tarr Chronicles (PC)

One aspect of the game I liked apart from the combat, which was pretty fun, is the customisation of your ship. Pick a new ship; load it up to the teeth with weapons and so on. It's not just about packing as many guns or bombs into the thing as it can feasibly hold though, it's about working out what balance is important to the mission at hand. There are some pre-set loadouts but I'm the kind of guy that likes to tinker with things (I loved Chromehounds for the insane customisation) and customise till I'm blue in the face.

If you combine this with the GUI and the no-nonsense controls you can start to get a feel for why despite what I said earlier, I still quite like the game. The story might be a bit strange and the missions linear, but with a smooth GUI and non-cluttered interface, lack of complex controls and fiddly settings it's fairly easy to pick up and play.

So that's the controls out of the way, the gameplay and the general feel of the game.

The graphics in Tarr Chronicles aren't anything amazingly special; they are however by no means shabby. Space is brought to life in a pretty decent way with a large number of celestial objects and in some missions a pretty eerie fog-like effect that limits what you can see. There are some massive super-structures to navigate and the whole thing does a good job of providing that epic space feel some games lack.

The weapon special effects are nice, the explosions are some of the best I've seen in a time and I so wish that they'd replace the ones in X3 with these. They look superb and there are little smoke trails when a ship's about to go down so you can sit back and get ready for the eye-candy.

The ships might look the same in their design but they're well textured enough that it wasn't too much of an issue with me. An icon to tell a capship and a merchant apart might have been a nice touch but after a while I started to pick up on some of the differences and well, it's not too hard to work out when you realise the trader you thought you had in your sights has more guns than the NRA put together.

The music is decent enough but at times the weapon sounds (which are also fairly Ok) can overpower it. Another area that is definitely in need of a polish and re-do are the voices. I mean, these people are mumbling or whispering at times and with the overpowered weapon sounds it's hard to hear what they have to say. In some cases that's a blessing because the voice work is awful, not Two Worlds awful, but getting pretty close.

I don't see it being as replayable as an open-ended space sim to be honest, the linear missions are Ok and they're fun but there's no last ability in this one beyond a single play-through to be honest. It's about time that someone stepped up to the plate and made a game like Freespace I and II, a game that has us enjoying the glory days of those space sims, Wing Commander you can come back, all is forgiven!

Tarr Chronicles isn't a brilliant game, it's not a rubbish game, it's an average kind of experience that's good for a blast but then after that you could play with the impressive customisation options. That's all though, there's nothing truly gripping about anything in the game.