Review – Parkan II

The description of this fitted what I’ve been waiting for nearly 20 years. An open ended space sim with trading, pirating, bounty hunting, a wealth of missions and hundreds of ways to improve your ship, plus, and this is what I have been waiting for,  you can land on planets, get out of your space ship into a FTS game again with loads of improvements to buy and develop the avatar. With today’s gfx capabilities it should be mint, and the screen shots looked awesome –

10 seconds in, trying to change the resolution from 800×600 to 1680*1050 I get my first warning, 1680*1050 was off the screen, and unselectable, I ended up having to change the resolution incrementally 4 times, and forced to restart each time before I could get to my desired res, each time having to watch the 2 minute intro that would of been ashamed to call itself an intro 15 years ago. Finally though, I could play the game.

 After playing 30 minutes the awful truth started to dawn, and after a quick google it was confirmed, its a 4 year old Russian game that has recently been translated in English, really badly as well, for example when trying to get on board a wrecked ship my AI implant informed me that “The ship won’t open its beam, better exit into it another way”.  
 Bad voice acting I can live, in fact sometimes enjoy, as long as the game lived up to its description I would be fine.

<<INSERT CLARKSON PAUSE HERE>>

I was not fine.

The FPS portion of the game is fuck awful, the planets are covered in wavy 4 foot high grass but little else, each planet has 3 buildings on them, and a population of about 12 retards who start shooting as soon as I touched down, The enemy talents included the ability to turn on “Noclip” enabling them to walk through doors, walls and in one memorable gunfight to float up through the ceiling whilst shouting “Now we burn!” in a camp robotic voice. But still, this was only part of the game, I could in theory never set foot on a planet and still enjoy the space part.  

However out in Space it gets no better, the first thing I did in Space was answer a distress call from a freighter who thanked me for saving him before I had started to attack his perusers (Who in fact did not appear until I arrived and had contacted the freighter, a clever ruse on the part of the pirates? Or a fucked up mission trigger point, I’ll let you decide) Even better, as “soon” as I had dispatched the Pirates, I’ve put soon in inverted comma’s as the dog fights take forever, the freighter promptly flew into a star, thus not allowing me to talk to him again and screwing up the mission storyline, ah well, I’ll just go to the next mission…. what’s that Mrs AI….I can’t fly to the next mission till I have spoken to the freighter captain…how could you possibly know that I needed to speak to…  oh well there is nothing I can do as you can see he has inadvertently vaporized himself and the ship in that star over there…oh, your quite adamant I can’t progress until I have. I see.

Luckily I found a workaround to this by quitting the game, un-installing it and deleting the save game files and tossing the game in the bin.

Bitterly dissapointed. Marks out of ten? I’d give it a tumour.

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