Whale’s Voyage II: Die Übermacht
Whale’s Voyage II: Die Übermacht is the sequel to Whale’s Voyage. The story
takes place twenty years after the crew of the spaceship Whale had won a great
battle and became heroes, abolishing a powerful dictatorship. Now all of the
money has been spent and the only thing the four heroes can do is to start
trading again. The first job should be quite simple: just deliver some nuclear
material to a foreign planet. There is also some payment in advance. But
unfortunately the crew takes too much time for the delivery and so the easy
job becomes a deadly task and they become involved in a conspiracy.
This game is similar to its predecessor, being a role-playing game with
trading elements. The character creation allows the player to shape four
characters, distributing their primary attributes, among which are combat-
related stats as well as categories such as rhetorics and humanity. The player
also must select a flaw for each character, ranging from bad temper to
epilepsy. These flaws may affect the character’s future behavior in certain
situations: for example, a clumsy character would sometimes drop an object
from his inventory. The choice of education background determines the
characters’s class. The available classes are Soldier, Medic, Monk, Psionian,
Biochemist, Bounty Hunter, Electrician, Rhetorician, Pilot, and
Cybertechnician. Human or alien race traits are assigned to the characters
randomly.
When orbiting a planet, the player-controlled team can refuel, upgrade the
ship with better components, or trade goods. Each planet has preference for a
specific kind of wares, and the traders would declare it to the party. Unlike
the first game, the player is not confined to one star system, though overall
there are only nine planets to travel to in the game. Each planet is presented
as a separate first-person maze-like environment. As opposed to the first
game, exploration graphics are real 3D, with sprites for characters and
objects. The interface has also been modified to include mouse control.
Following the main quest involves talking to NPCs and fulfilling their
requests, but the player is free to travel to any planet and explore them from
the onset. Through traveling itself is automatic, the Whale may be ambushed by
hostile ships on the way, participating in turn-based tactical ship combat.
Ground combat, on the other hand, proceeds in real time, with a “general
attack” option that makes the party attack at once. Like in other RPGs, the
heroes earn experience points by killing enemies or solving quests.
This being the second game in the series, events from the first game are
referred to and some characters reappear. For example, a woman which will give
the heroes a quest appeared in the first game, where she was still a little
girl.
Whale’s Voyage II: Die Übermacht