Colony Wars: Vengeance is a space combat simulator video game developed and released by Psygnosis for the PlayStation in 1998, and a sequel to the original Colony Wars, which was released the previous year. You complete various space combat missions using a range of starfighters that you can update and equip with various weapons. One of the innovative and pretty cool things about this game is that it features multiple paths of missions and outcomes, depending on the player’s performance. So losing a mission isn’t always a bad thing, though that doesn’t feel great.

Pros:

I remember picking this up as a kid and just being blown away by the look and feel of it. I mean flying around in space is cool enough, but being able to fly in any directly in a three dimension space with some rather impressive graphics for the PS1 is what pulled me in. The remember the flight controls were rather intuitive when I first picked it up too so that helped to pull me in. You have multiple weapons, missiles, and tools you can use throughout the missions and even change between missions to best suit your needs. And upgrading your various ships as you go, also really rocked. The missions themselves are quite varied too, not only in objective but having space missions and planetary missions help to change it up as well. A really cool feature which is a Colony Wars trope is the fact that you can win and lose missions and still continue playing the game. You work your way down a storyline tree depending on which missions you are successful or fail in and In total, you can get five different endings. most of them are pretty grim… METAL.

Cons:

The storyline tree system was really impressive for its time, but I did feel like some missions were almost made to be unbeatable, which could get really frustrating. Also as a kid new to this kind of a system, losing a level still felt like a failure and I had to just keep playing a “failure” path, (maybe I was a bit too hard on myself) so this took some getting used to for me at least. Once I understood/accepted the overall storyline system, it did get a bit better, but being able to see all of the other options I could have had if I passed a mission left me always feeling bad and not really willing to commit to the “failure: storyline tree. I also found myself really wanting to replay several missions (not just the failed ones) just because I didn’t quite understand the briefing as well as I thought I did. The problem though is that you can’t easily replay the missions, at least not instantly, because when you lose the game just keeps going. This is made worse by the fact that you can’t save after every mission, but more like three missions. This means that if you want to replay a missions you will find yourself replaying one or two missions just to get to the one that you wanted to replay. And you are going to have to from time to time to get the various endings. Making the easy missions really repetitive.