Parkan: The Imperial Chronicles, is a very rough 90's gem from Russia. It's an open world Space Combat Flight Sim, with First Person Shooter elements. The player has to uncover the mystery behind the disappearance of the Imperial Starship "Wanderer", lost in a sector of space populated by robots. In his travels, he will fight many enemies both in space and on the ground (The FPS elements mentioned earlier).

What sets this game apart from similar games of the day, is the planet/base exploration element. When docking to a planet, you can leave your ship and explore it. For obvious reasons, each planet consists only of the base, but the layout of it, is randomized from planet to planet. Some of the planets can be also colonized, creating a stable source of income (fuel) and a base of operations. In most of the exploring, you will either fight or you will be looking for the next item needed to complete the story.

The idea behind the game is ambitious, but the execution leaves much to be desired, due to the limits of the technology of the time, and the lack of quality control. First of all, completing the game, involves hunting down a number of items needed to equip your ship. But these items are placed completely at random inside the bases, are hard to notice and sometimes you cannot find them at all. Thankfully exiting and re-entering the base will reset the level, and finally the needed item will be found. (Hint: Always check the metro rails.)

Secondly, the game is hard and not particularly fair. There is a point in the final couple of hours of the game, where I nearly quit playing it ! But since I was playing through emulation (more on that below), I was able to use save states, and finally finish the game. The combination of a nasty nearly game breaking bug, and some very unfortunate design decisions, makes the game nearly unplayable.

If you think of buying it, an excellent Youtube channel that covers extensively all aspects of the game, can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/user/IstrebitelQzar/videos

The GoG version is compatible with Windows 98, under DosBox emulation. Not only the game can be upscaled, and many post processing filters can be applied, the dosbox version used has save states, that are extremely useful, at some parts of the game. The following links, can provide information on how to install Windows 98 over DosBox.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPq3_m5MGAI

http://dosbox95.darktraveler.com/w98%20part%201.html

If we lived still in the 90's and the game had better quality control, this would be a 5 star blockbuster game. Now days it seems that two stars are more than enough.

Thank you for your good comments and excellent links.

I'm a long-time player of this game. I also have made some mods for Parkan II years ago.
The 'bugs' you talk about in Parkan: The Imperial Chronicles don't exist I think because it's intended behavior: Late in the game when departing from Hegemount's asteroid saving the game will not work, that is: you can actually save but the file is useless, the authors wanted you to play the next parts without saving! It's indeed very surprising that this game after only 1 patch released in 1997 has no real bugs I'm aware of, a real rarity and a prove for the high quality the authors have put in the game at that time. Nowadays the music is different, with most of such games unplayable after release, not so with Parkan 1.

The walkthrough video is the best I have seen for this game and the game version played with it shows some huge improvements over the 'common' known English version which are: Subtitles in English for the Intro, in-game music that will loop correctly, new music tracks for different worlds, slightly different game behavior with missions when no transport ships are in the system.

I'd like to know if this walthrough video was played with the GoG version. Does the GoG version have subtitles in the intro? In this case it's the same version. Thanks to any GoG player to let me know!