The Collection Chamber: TELLURIAN DEFENSE

FROM THE RUINS OF ENVIRONMENTAL APOCALYPSE, EARTH'S NATIONS ARE REBUILDING.

Their efforts are nearing completion when disaster strikes again and an alien invasion force swarms down with the planet in its sights.

BUT THIS TIME, EARTH FIGHTS BACK.

As a fighter pilot in the Earth Defense Organization you're at the heart of the resistance, carrying out strategic combat missions while honing your skills and those of your wingmen. Why the aliens have arrived, you don't yet know. But they haven't counted on the strength and determination of your small fighter squadron.
Fast combat action and strategic planning - upgrade your craft and develop your own genetically enhanced wingmen
Fly over vast 3D landscapes with real-life landmarks
Sophisticated flight system gives you full control of your craft, its devastating weapons and your wingmen
Huge, immersive missions scripted by Morgan Gendel, writer for 'Star Trek: The Next Generation'
Full multiplayer capability via LAN, modem to modem and Internet

~ from the back of the US box

To a certain portion of retro gamers, Psygnosis' PlayStation glory days hold an especially fond place in their hearts and thumbs. WipEout might have been their crowning glory, but the sci-fi combat sim of Colony Wars was equally cool - enough to spawn two sequels. Alas, they never left Sony's grey box, so what did PC gamers get? The answer: Tellurian Defense. Released in 1999, it feels like a complete inverse of Colony Wars, becoming their forgotten, much less celebrated PC-only cousin.

The plot at least tries to evoke a sweeping interstellar conflict. You pilot a craft defending humanity from a hostile alien force threatening the Tellurian colonies on the surface of a future (well, 2024) Planet Earth. It's a perfectly serviceable sci-fi premise, but it never develops the world or factions in the way Colony Wars famously did through FMV briefings and shifting campaign outcomes. Here, mission descriptions are spartan, characters nonexistent, and the universe feels more like a placeholder than a battleground. It does the bare minimum to keep things moving forward, but never enough to make you care.

What does impress, especially coming from a the era, is the graphics. Ship models are crisp and nicely designed, explosions are suitably flashy, and that distinctive neon aesthetic Psygnosis once adored is all here. The only issue is that it lacks much in the way of variety. Stages consist of islands and archipelagos with a tiny scattering of high-rise cities plonked here and there. Even stages taking place in real-world locations, like San Francisco, blur together with the rest of them. Enemy types rarely stand out, and missions reuse the same visual palette to the point of monotony. Still, on pure technical merit, Tellurian Defence looks surprisingly slick for the era and hardware it targeted. It apparently supports higher resolutions out of the box, providing options all the way up to 1920x1080, but this is a bit of a lie. Anything higher or wider than 800x600 will cause glitches and crashes - particularly when calling up the map - so I left the graphical enhancements to the post-processing capabilities of dgVoodoo.

When it comes to the gameplay, things really begin to unravel. Beneath the surface lies a competent but unremarkable space-combat loop of dogfights, objective markers, and strike missions, but it's all buried under a deeply volatile exterior. Enemy AI swings wildly between too passive and brutally accurate, and your craft handles with the ungainly aerodynamic grace of a fridge tipped off a warehouse shelf and expected to fly. Even at its fasted, the craft seems particularly slow, which you'd assume would help with aiming, but the wobbly turning speed puts the kibosh on that. So much so that a lock-on feature has been implemented presumably to help with this.

And then there are the controls. They completely obliterate any positives Tellurian Defense could possible have! Roll is bound to the cursor keys Left and Right, pitch to cursor Up and Down, while acceleration and deceleration sit on X and Z. Shooting - in an unusual move - is mapped to V, an utterly unintuitive choice when every space sim from Wing Commander to X-Wing to Freespace used Space or the modifier keys (Ctrl, Alt, Shift). Targeting functions are scattered across B, T, R, E, and S like someone spilled Scrabble tiles and called it ergonomics. Even boost is on W and match speed hidden on Return. To top things off, a third hand is required to use the mouse should you want to look around in any other direction than straight ahead. It's like the designers actively avoided ergonomic design, and the result is a control scheme that single-handedly sabotages the experience.

Part of the game's obscurity comes from its unfortunate timing. Released right as Sony completed its buyout of Psygnosis and folded the studio into the newly branded Studio Liverpool, Tellurian Defence slipped out with barely a whisper. Even later budget re-releases failed to give it much traction to a point that this gaming fanatic hadn't even heard of it until I looked closely at the company's back catalogue on MobyGames. For a company once synonymous with cutting-edge presentation and cult-classic hits, it's remarkable how thoroughly this title vanished from public memory. It feels like the last gasp of an era. A casualty of corporate restructuring.

The one unambiguous triumph here is the music. Tim Wright - better known by his iconic alias CoLD SToRAGE - composed the soundtrack, and it's an absolute banger. Wright, who made his mark as an in-house Psygnosis composer with legendary work on WipEout, Colony Wars, and even the early audio frameworks that would evolve into Music Creation for the PlayStation, brings his trademark of high-energy electro-club tracks. His contributions here elevate the action far beyond what the gameplay itself deserves and well worth listening to on its own.

In the end, Tellurian Defence is as a frustrating disappointment that perhaps deserves its obscurity - especially when you consider the pedigree behind it. The graphics are solid, the music exceptional, and the premise workable, but the atrocious controls and unpolished gameplay doom it to oblivion. For dedicated fans, it's an interesting curiosity in the history of Psygnosis, but certainly not a lost classic.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses dgVoodoo to run on modern systems with with IMG Drive Portable. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 10.

File Size: 752 Mb. Install Size: 988 Mb. Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

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