Epic

STORY / GAMEPLAY
The Sun is about to turn into a Supernova and humans are evacuating their home planet via large spaceships. Unfortunately the best escape from disaster leads straight to the territory of the Rexxon Empire and this is considered as an act of war! You're the best fighter pilot around and your fate is to protect the human kind by flying one of the most advanced "Epic Class" space-fighters! The game starts with a wonderful intro that shows the story via great visuals and a really great soundtrack. The game offers eight different levels in full 3D that take you either in deep space or over a planet's surface. Each mission has a time limit to complete and usually involves destroying assigned targets or protecting the humans' space fleet from incoming Rexxon fighters. Before each mission, briefing is done by the Fleet Commander's Headquarters. The controls and the action is exactly the same as in a typical fighter-pilot simulator where you fly the Epic fighter from inside the cockpit. The cockpit shows a few digital instruments (speed, heading, shield etc) for your navigation.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The game offers wonderful 3D environments of great detail and fast animation. The MS-DOS version uses a larger color palette compared to the original (Amiga) version while the action is faster as long as you own a 16MHz+ 286/386 PC and a basic VGA graphics. The game's visuals are taken from the (excellent) F-29 Retaliator flight simulator (released in 1990 by DID/Ocean). All visuals are viewed in 3D and consist of a mix of colored polygons and bitmaps performing astonishing screens of animated objects. The game's sound is also good, offering a cool intro tune mixed by the famous David Whittaker and taken from the "The Planets Suite" masterpiece, composed and offered by Gustav Holst. There are some other cut-scene tunes too as well as several in-game sampled sound effects (like laser/missile firing, explosions, spaceship thrusts etc). Comparably, the Amiga version's sound is much better than the ST and DOS counterparts.

GAMEPLAY VIDEO
On our compilation video we have included the Atari ST, Amiga and DOS versions of the game.