A warm, balanced and action-packed role-playing game in a detailed world with strong characters and many things to do.
Graphics:
Supreme to the other formats, the graphics in-combat are still amazingly rough and the environments get repetitive fairly quickly. The animated portraits of the people you meet and the places you go are looking great! Although they are very few, they add to the atmosphere of the game. That you can customize your icons as you create your characters doesn't make much of a difference since they all look blocky and ugly, but at least you GET to do it. At the inventory screen where you can trade, equip and drop weapons and other equipment all males look the same and all females look the same, regardless of chosen race (there are three in total to choose from). Sometimes you encounter other space-ships and are thrust into turn-based combat. These fights look pretty good and you can see the enemy ship getting damaged. Apart from this, the graphics ARE an improvement over the PC and C64 versions, but they still look pretty mediocre at best.
61%
Sound:
The music is truly original and I've never heard anything like it. The high-pitch tones are very annoying and as you enter Mariposo 3, the city on Mercury, it changes into a horrible sounding medieval French tune. The sound effects hold a low standard even for SSI games and thinking that this game has to compete with the impressive sounding other games released on the Genesis at the same time (1991-1992) makes me shiver in terror. In the quick menu you pull up as you press the A button, you can toggle the music on and off though. Thanks! Explosions sound like a plastic ruler wobbling, lasers sound like Geckos and everything just sounds bad.
31%
Game play:
Firstly, you can choose to play with the pre-generated team SSI made for you or you can choose to create new characters, which is of course what everyone will do. Creating characters in Buck Rogers is a blast! You have three races (Humans, the barbaric desert runners and the small Tinkers) Tinkers can only be medics, desert runners can be of warrior or rocket jock class. Humans can be all of these , plus rogue. The skill-system is interesting. You have many rare skills, that you might not use that much in other games. Or in this one for that matter. Cool and interesting (unfortunately, pretty useless) skills like library-search and climb (used twice in the game) have to compete for the hard earned skill-points with vital skills such as maneuver in zero-g, first aid and the career based skills (leadership, weapon specialties, bypass security, treat wounds and jury-rig). To train and level up is really cool and you really feel like you are getting better. You can feel each level increase significantly. Exploring the space is viewed from a top-down perspective as you see your rocket. You steer your rocket around and you can land on various moons, space stations and planets, as you learn their location and they become available. The explorations outside the ship are seen from a fake isometric- 3d perspective. This is also the case with combat, which is turn-based and tactical. Unfortunately there is not a lot of strategy involved. There are grenades that stop laser-beams and there are those who stop rockets etc. but these items are forgotten pretty quickly as you play through the game. As long as you keep a few different weapons on each character (preferably a needle gun, as I haven't seen anything that prevents you from using these kinds of weapons) you'll be ok. The game is actually pretty easy and short but holds many side-missions you can do. And just exploring the world is really cool, and if you are like me, you'll also enjoy the random encounters in space as you can board the enemy spacecrafts and get bounty. A lot of fun and a cool story about a doomsday-laser being built by the Russo-American-Mercantile corporation unfolds. You'll encounter a group of desert runners of Mars, space pirates, hordes of acid-frogs, Lowlanders (lizard looking humanoids living on Venus) and agents of various types. It's all done with very much heart and the special team at SSI did a hell of a job porting this from the PC version.
83%
Lastability:
I have personally played through this game twice and I am sure I will do it again. It's definitely worth the couple of days you will sacrifice. I still manage to find new side-missions and stuff happens as you go along. Trying to beat the game with another kind of party is also cool. This is an adventure that leaves no-one untouched. It's an atmospheric science fiction story that I would experience again any day.
89%
Overall:
A warm, balanced and action-packed role-playing game in a detailed world with strong characters and many things to do. Incredibly fun exploring save for graphics in-battle and one of the most annoying soundtrack in gaming history.
82%