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You can get full disc images of Mission Critical from our ISO Cellar.
Year 2134, in the midst of the war between the United Nations and the Alliance. The USS Lexington is heading towards an unknown target, a classic top-secret mission. But something goes wrong: the ship is intercepted by an enemy cruiser that manages to win the battle and disable the Lexington. Defeated Captain Dayna takes a drastic decision: to surrender all the crew to the enemy, but together with a nuclear device. The plan is to blow up the enemy ship at the cost of the lives of the crew of the Lexington . He leaves only one person behind with the heavy task of repairing the ship and finishing the job, alone. And so it begins.
Mission Critical looks like a cross between Myst and a classic graphic adventure: we will face the entire game in first person, advancing in static screens, but at the same time we have our trusty inventory to solve many different object-based puzzles. Needless to say, as usual for a Legend game, you can die. I can immediately tell that the graphics offer a more than satisfactory experience. Plus the look of the ship is so aseptic, almost hospital-like, that the player will feel even more a overwhelming feeling of loneliness, feeling softened only in part by the dialogues with the loquacious computer board. Also there will be numerous cutscenes, both in computer graphics and live action.
The riddles observe the inert context and will be for the duration of the game absolutely logical. On the other hand here it is highlighted a first deficiency in Legend's work: the first half of the game is too serious; repairing a ship stranded in the middle of nowhere is not the most exciting experience that can happen to you, I can assure you. The developers have in any case attempted to enrich the gaming experience by inciting the player to explore the Lexington across its 9 (!) floors.
We'll discover small twists during our work as galactic laborer, such as mini-games that we must solve, for example, to repair the cooling system of the ship, or to try to communicate with the outside world, or even in the case of space combat --a true game inside the game, but it's better not to reveal too much. The adventure takes a sharp U-turn in the second half of the game, when it changes pace in a pleasantly unexpected way.
A brief mention for the music, which is not bad but to be honest I was not particularly impressed. The voice acting, on the other hand, is pretty good.
In conclusion Mission Critical is an adventure that, especially at the beginning, might bore you, but it recovers to a superlative second half. If the end were a little more daring I would be even more enthusiastic, but you know, perfection does not exist.
Run setup.bat in DOSBox before starting the game for a first time. A lot of sound files will be processed so it may take a while. After that, game will run properly in DOSBox and you don't need to use setup.bat anymore.
Mission Critical Review Posted on: 2013-11-02 by SirStefan Having played the game completely through a number of times, I was impressed with the rather philosophical ending and considered its RL implications from time to time. There is still a Prima walkthrough guide available on Amazon and it may come in handy for a few of the more difficult puzzles one will encounter on this mission. The original product involved 3 cd's to play the whole thing through with the bulk of the action occurring on the second cd. I was a little disappointed with the second half as it limited your available options to an almost linear progression which I suspect may have been the result of budget or schedule constraints leaving little time for option development. Once you move about the ship a while it did become familiar and you could easily navigate to "critical" areas quickly if needed. It is similar to some of its contemporaries in that the player must interact with on-screen objects in order to progress and sometimes one cannot tell an object from the background props. I still think that the EVA segment had a glitch in it but I am not certain as I can get lost in complex maze games occasionally. The HYPE defensive practice was the most "fun" challenge of it, and the attention to detail overall made it a very realistic experience. Even after all the puzzles were familiar, one could go through it again with an eye toward exploring other options to see the results rather than leaving them to chance. It was a decidedly male oriented game as the main character (you) responds aloud to computer and person alike in a male voice in real time depending on your choices of reply. There is an onscreen map available during game play while one is on the ship which helps in navigation, but you are on your own otherwise. It is not a "rushed" game in the sense of a first-person shooter, but there are timed events that will result in an dire emergency if not attended to. All things considered, it was a really enjoyable game that first timers will not solve in an evening, and may even find themselves as nothing more than scintillating droplets of frozen goo floating in the outer reaches of space. |
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