After the Ultima Underworld games and System Shock, and before Thief and System Shock 2, Looking Glass released the now somewhat obscure Terra Nova, a military sci-fi game about soldiers who fight in Starship Troopers-like powered armor.
In the future, humans colonized the solar system, but Earth fell under an authoritarian global government, the Hegemony, so some of the people living further out decided to flee to the Alpha Centauri system to live freely. Which took the form of separating into clans that each did things their own way, but at least they weren't under the Hegemony's thumb. Then the Hegemony comes after them and a war breaks out and your character (Nikola ap Io) is the new commander of...Strike Force Centauri.
It's been said that everyone around Origin in the 90s had Wing Commander fever and this game shows it in a big way. There are FMV sequences intended to flesh out the story and characters that somehow look cheap yet simultaneously were apparently so expensive to film that they compromised the game's budget. The scenes are kind of endearing in how low-budget they are, and the characters come across as a bit too high-strung and melodramatic for being such high-level operatives (something Team America: World Police parodies so well), but the traitor subplot is kind of interesting while it lasts. Mostly, the story is just a means to provide some context for the kinds of missions you're assigned.
In terms of how it plays, it's a lot like System Shock. System Shock's biggest issue is that its controls and interface are so complex that you feel more like you're controlling a human-sized mech instead of a person, but a system like that transferred to a game in which you're actually controlling a human-sized mech makes it make sense. You click on sub-systems like weapons, communications, and damage status, select targets in the world view, and then fire on those targets while your suit auto-aims at what you've selected. It's actually a very fast game compared to many other vehicular sims and missions often take less than 5 minutes to complete.
It's fun to play and has just the right amount of complexity. The AI for squadmates is mostly pretty good as they carry their weight in fights but still need your help to succeed and they'll make good decisions in terms of picking targets and moving around. Looking Glass's expertise in immersive gameplay shows out in how you have the freedom to accomplish objectives as you see best. You can charge in blasting, but sneaking and keeping things at a distance is usually a good option, too. The graphics are quite decent for their time but resolution is sadly very limited - it would help the game be more attractive to modern players if there was a way to increase it beyond 320x400.
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