Mission Critical
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| Mission Critical {{#if:{{{image|}}}|<tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">{{{image|}}} | |
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| Developer(s) | Legend Entertainment {{#if:{{{publisher|}}}|<tr><th style="background-color: #ccccff;">Publisher(s)<td>{{{publisher|}}} |
| Release date(s) | 1995 |
| Genre(s) | Adventure game |
| Mode(s) | Single player {{#if:{{{ratings|}}}|<tr><th style="background-color: #ccccff;">Rating(s)<td>{{{ratings|}}} |
| Platform(s) | DOS {{#if:{{{media|}}}|<tr><th style="background-color: #ccccff;">Media<td>{{{media|}}} |
Mission Critical is an adventure game released in 1995 by Legend Entertainment. Though its main advertising point was the presence of Star Trek: The Next Generation actor Michael Dorn, he played a very small role in the game.
In Mission Critical, you play the sole survivor of the USS Lexington and USS Jericho, a pair of starships sent by the Alliance of Free States on a secret mission to a world far from Earth. You are the only person capable of completing the mission, and saving not only the Alliance, but thousands of star systems from total destruction.
Contents |
Storyline (currently incomplete)
You awaken on Deck 2 of the Lexington's habitat module after being rendered unconscious by the captain, the only clue to what happened being a hastily penned letter explaining that you are the only living member of the Lexington's crew and that you must complete the secret mission the vessel was sent on. Unfortunately, various immediate threats (a hull breach in a stateroom and a reactor on the verge of melting through the ship's hull) take priority.
Once you solve those crises, you are tasked with restoring functionality to the ship's computer, where a message from the Lexington's executive officer await. She asks you to repair the communcations system for the ship and to make contact with the Alliance military on the Erebus colony.
Once you manage to contact Erebus, an Alliance admiral reluctantly fills you in on the true nature of the Lexington's mission: to investigate a construction on the world Persephone, believed to be developed by aliens, which may hold the key to ending the war between the Alliance and the United Nations. The only problem is: with only one crew member remaining, the UN will be able to destroy the Lexington and the Jericho, go to the surface of Persephone, and take the prize for themselves.
The solution lies in a highly experimental concoction called Hype. A mix of nanomachines and neurochemicals, Hype requires the brain of its user, allowing him to control the automated fighter drones used for intership combat directly. Without Hype, battle progresses too fast for the drones to be controlled remotely. Unfortunately, Hype has a side effect: it inevitably kills whoever uses it.
Gameplay & Design
Mission Critical has a varied mixture of gameplay elements, including a large number of traditional object puzzles, Myst-style backstory deduction from fragments of evidence found about the ship, a couple of fiddle puzzles, in-depth conversations with several characters and (possibly unique among adventure games) a real time strategy minigame, in which the player must defend the ship from two challenging waves of enemy vessels. Certain puzzles are timed, but the time limit is extremely generous, though no easy way is provided to gauge the amount of time passed, as in Access Software's Countdown.
Contrary to the example set by many other games, the strategy minigame is well implemented. It could pass for a full fledged game in its own right, and is seamlessly integrated into the gameplay. The battles are controlled from a tactical computer interface on the ship's bridge, there is an analogue difficulty slider (which sets the battles to win themselves on the lowest setting, if the player does not want to fight them), and there is a speed control slider.
The way the minigame is designed is an example of the extraordinarily high general realism of the game overall - just as one might in real life, the relatively low-ranking player (a lieutenant senior grade, specifically a supply officer) must get authorization from command to use the tactical system, then modify the ship's systems to enable it to be controlled single-handed, then complete several well-thought out training missions (these can also be bypassed if desired) of increasing difficulty and varying strategy before being able to defend the ship proper. The attacks themselves are timed and usually occur when the player is attempting to do something elsewhere on the ship, and he must scramble to the bridge and fight them off before returning to what he was working on - this adds tension to the game once the enemy ships start to arrive.
The sense of physical reality and detail is pleasing and scrupulously exact, much more so than many other space games or even science-fiction games in general. For example, the accommodation decks make up a tiny part of the ship. Just as would be the case in real life, these decks are referred to in the game as making up the habitat module. The bulk of the ship is taken up by machinery. The machinery itself can be seen to include gigantic fuel systems, reactor and electrical spaces, weapons bays, and a shuttle bay. The accommodation areas contain almost everything one might expect, including numerous different individual staterooms for a crew compliment rated at 20-25, a canteen with a minimalist recreaction area, a wardroom, a sickbay, a communications shack, storerooms, and a small scientific laboratory. It is telling that because the U. S. S. Lexington is a serving front-line warship in an ongoing total war situation which has lasted for some years, the scientific laboratory is the only part of the ship which has not been upgraded in decades. There are no sanitary facilities, though this is something of a standard in science fiction TV, games and films.
Graphics
The bulk of the game consists of well made 3D renderings (the entirety of the spaceship, and several other locations), presented in static screens with transitional animations between most areas. Cutscenes are in full screen video with live actors. A few locations were evidently too complex for the 3D renderers of the period, however, and in these cases the designers used a mixture of computer generated images and highly detailed, hand-painted backdrops, with some 2D animation effects to compensate for the lack of transition movies in these parts, though the painted backdrops are of a sufficient quality not to break the sense of immersion in the game.
Sound
The game utilises stereo sampled voice and sound effects, music being provided (like many games of the era) via MIDI, although the FMV cutscenes had the music incorporated in the sampled soundtrack. The voice, sound effects and music are of a uniformly good quality.
Technology
Like most DOS games, Mission Critical, though advanced for its time, is somewhat difficult to run on modern computers - it requires a soundcard compatible with those of the era, offers no windows executable, weighs in on three CDs and the strategy minigame runs much too fast on modern processors. There is a way to fix most of these problems, however - all three CDs can be copied and run from a single DVD with no additional modifications as long as the directory structure is preserved, many modern soundcards offer hardware support of "legacy" devices (though certain motherboards can stop this feature from working properly), and certain programs are available to artificially slow down modern CPUs to run the game at an appropriate speed. The game can also be run easily in emulators such as DosBox.