Terminus

Terminus allows you to follow the story in single- and multiplayer modes, but also gives you the freedom to explore the solar system and do what you want to do in free mode. You can choose from a variety of career paths, including fighter pilot, mercenary, and merchant. And, perhaps best of all, the game's comprehensive ship simulation allows you to customize your craft with bought, stolen, or salvaged parts.

The largest effect of the true physics model is to force you to rely very heavily on your navagation computer and systems. Stopping your ship is now done by touching a key and letting the computer handle it. Docking your ship is similarly computer-controlled. Even in combat, you fight through the computer's guidance systems: it provides a lead line and aiming cursor for you to shoot at, and the position of the enemy ship soon becomes irrelevant. The challenge of fighting becomes your precision in aiming your weapons inside the little circle drawn by the flight computer. Often, you get the impression that your PC would be doing a better job flying the ship without you.

Another much-lauded feature that has mixed results is its persistent, active universe. Events occur whether or not you are presant, and your presence in many battles and missions is not key to their success or failure. Realistic? You bet. Fun? Well, not really. When your actions become unimportant, you play a more minor role in the game, and you experience far less enjoyment. It is more fun to have the thrill of leading the great assault on Battleship XYZ than it is to fire a couple missiles while the computer-controlled ships do all the work.

There is a good side to this openness: the freedom of choice. If you strongly dislike linear games, then Terminus may be ideal for you. You can mine asteroids in a remote section of the Solar System as easily as you can fight for Earth or be a pirate. Your path is up to you. Remember, however, that because each of these paths is so open and unscripted, you will not experience a rich storyline if you take advantage of this freedom. Your adventure is what you make of it, and no more.

Another feature that had the potential to be great was the ship editor. With this interface, you can purchase components and construct your own ship part by part. Unfortunately, the rules for which parts can go in which ship slots are often unclear, and you may find yorself filling slots with unnecessary pieces. Additionally, there are a variety of energy, fuel, and systems components that must be included in our ship designs, but it is easy to forget one because they do not have an easily apparent function on gameplay. The game will simply tell you your ship is not complete, and leave it to you to guess which part needs to be added. The process of testing different combinations of parts in various ship slots is a waste of time (and credits) that could have been avoided through better documentation on how to build a ship.

There is a long manual included, containing more info than most game manuals do today. However, there are so many controls and aspects of Terminus that even a manual of this hefty size is incomplete. As noted above, it leaves out the details on how to build ships, and you will find numerous other game functions and controls that you wished were better-documented in the manual.

Terminus is a multi-platform game, and each box contains everything necessary to get the game running under Windows, Mac, and Linux. However, one way this is done is by making the game's music into standard audio tracks on a separate CD. To play music while you fly through space, you need the music CD in the drive. This means that all game data must be copied to your hard drive to leave the CD drive open for music. This, the minimum install takes up over 700 megabytes of space, an incredible amount of data copied to you disk. The advantage is that you do not need a CD in the drive to play (if you don't want music), which is a rarity among large modern games.

Multiplayer support may be the strength of this title. Wandering around a universe that proceeds, indepedent from your actions, is much more fun when you have companions to wander with you. You can cooperate with other human players to achieve greater results and have a greater affect on your world. Alternately, you can fight with other human players, or one person can become a merchant and the other a pirate.

Interactions with real people become all the more essential due to the flat, lifeless nature of the NPCs. Anyone you talk to in a starbase or elsewhere never once seems alive, or to be really conversing with you. Rather, it is like a series of little speeches that they deliver, and you select the speech you want to hear from a menu of choices desguised as your responses to their words.

The version of the game in the box has a significant number of bugs, but they are almost all addressed by a patch currently availible from Vicarious Vision's web site. Downloading the latest patch at http://www.vvisions.com/terminus/downloads_frame.htm and installing it should deal with most issues you may encounter.

Terminus is an interesting game, with several new features and concepts that are unusual to the genre. There are many controls and you have an interesting flight system. However, when all is taken into account the game is not much fun. It does not really seem like a game. Instead, it seems like an experiment in creating a realistic flight engine and a realistic persistant universe in which the player is mostly irrelevant.


Terminus & Linux   August 1, 2000
Eric M. Gifford (PORTAGE, MICHIGAN United States)
10 out of 14 found this review helpful

Excellent install! I'm running Terminus under Mandrake 7.1 with 3dfx video & a SBLive board. The glide driver works great (2.x) for the graphics. One note however; you will need the latest creative drivers for linux to get the sblive sound to work right, AND get the latest Terminus patch. The patch provides better sound support. VVisions provides excellent support and have definite winner here for the Linux community. Have fun and enjoy! (I don't do windows!). The game play is great!


Highly realistic   July 4, 2000
A. Thorpe (Olivette, Missouri United States)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful

This is, hands down, the most detailed and realistic space combat game I've ever seen. The movement and physics seem completely true to a zero G environment. Add an evolving political story that's affected by your actions, or inactions, and you've got one immersive enviroment. I dropped one star due to a few bugs to be worked out, but the company is fixing them as they're being reported.


I've been deceived!   August 29, 2001
8 out of 16 found this review helpful

I give this game one star; not because it's a terrible game. In fact, if you're looking for a boring space/flight sim, then this is the game for you. I give it one star because on the box it's billed as "an epic space combat rpg." Notice the "rpg" in that sentence? Guess what; this is NOT a role playing game. At least, not in any meanigful sense. I bought the game to enjoy an immersive role-playing experience, but this is just another "pick a mission, fly around shooting things up, and then come back and pick another mission" game. Another problem is that the game doesn't seem to really work well with Windows ME, so if that's your OS, beware possible problems. I bought this game today, and I'm returning it tomorrow.