Tachyon: The Fringe

This game was released in 2000 by NovaLogic and THQ Nordic. I've found it isn't that well know.

Currently on discount on Steam for just ?1.74

It's a space combat flight sim, so if you like games such as X-Wing, Freespace, Wing Commander etc then you should like this. It has a good story and decent acting. Your character is even voiced by Bruce Campbell!

The controls let you pilot the ship very nicely. You have some fine controls to adjust speed, to rotate to target whilst moving along a different path, and the ability to reverse the engines to reduce speed and maintain distance from a target. The targeting controls are comprehensive to cycle through them, and you even have an auto pilot so when a mission objective to go through a jump gate or dock are set you just hit A and don't need to physically carry them out. You also have settings to adjust power to different systems when they have reduced during combat. And whilst in the hanger you can attach different weapons before you launch and then have controls to fire them separately or combined. On larger enemy ships you can also target subsystems, such as turrets, shield generators and engines, and can just take those out depending on objectives. Overall a nice control setup.

I've only been playing around using an Xbox controller and the keyboard. I'm going to connect up my HOTAS flight stick and throttle setup when I get chance and see if it recognises it. If not you can manually map each command so I can do it that way if not.. or another fallback is I can map the controller in Steam and the gasmer just sees it as keyboard control, which is an option for any Steam game.

So far I've only run through the tutorial missions. You have a jobs board you look at to take missions and earn money you can spend on upgrading your ship's weapons. Once into the main game you have an acted story mode with missons and objectives, and on missions you get a wingman who chats with you along the way.

For the age the game looks nice. It does only offer 4:3 resolutions so you are stuck with 1024x768. I need to look if there is a config file that can be edited to allow HD resolutions or a community patch, but it runs fine with black at the sides of the screen and it doesn't bother me that much. Sometimes on older games when you force widescreen it can break the UI.

And at the current price if you haven't heard of it then it's worth a look.

I actually revisited this game as I own the original physical copy and have been going through my collection. I wanted to declutter as I now have most of my physical games as digital versions too so don't really need both. I didn't have this digitally but saw it was so cheap on Steam and that was far less hassle as I don't have a DVD drive on most of my PCs these days. And as it's such an old game I installed the Steam version on Linux Mint, instead of in Windows as many older games have issues running on Win10/11. Installing and running this in Linux Mint using Steam with its built in Proton compatibility layer it installed and run perfectly. It detected my Xbox controller I had connected and it just worked. It wouldn't let me move the game to my second larger monitor, but other than that no issues. All the graphics and audio setup in the game worked perfectly, even launching Windows control panels for advanced graphic and audio settings to pick devices to use for each, and also to increase things like render distance, shadows, gamma etc. I maxed everything and it looked OK for a 26 year old game. Fully playable and just as good as I remember.

For a space combat game this remains one of the best. Well worth playing if you don't know about it. You can easily get 20 hours gameplay from it.

I will do an update when I've tried it with my HOTAS setup.