Since Wing Commander is (again) in bundle for decent price, I was wondering (once more:P) about buying it. There is one problem though - I don't know if it's suitable for me. Once upon a time I was playing a lot in Space Rangers 2, but it was a bit different game (for sure without "flying" thing, but at least it had some elements of "space-sim"). So here are my questions:

1.How hard is to fly and fight in this game? Is this some sort of hardcore simulator, which is quite complicated and requires some joystick to fully enjoy this title, or it's rather "arcade-style" and nothing to worry about?

2.How much "intuitive" is this series? I've found out such games as mentioned Space Rangers 2 as quite intuitive (and with a little help of tutorial I was able to understand almost all aspects of game). I'm aware that games from beginning of 90' were quite often a bit unintiutive (at least those more complicated, like some simulators or cRPGs).

I know that it's quite a big series with many titles, so if you can, please, write about some exceptions/differences between earlier/later titles from this series.

Thank you very much in advance for sharing your thoughts and advices!

They're arcade-ish space sims with a story. You watch cutscenes and talk with your companions between missions. The campaign is directly influenced by your mission performance, meaning that if you keep losing missions, you might lose the war.

They're pretty straightforward and there aren't a lot of controls, but a joystick is highly recommended. Too fast paced for K&M.

It sounds very tempting, but I don't have a joystick :( What a dillema.

It's not a very hardcore game in the same of using realistic physics or anything of the like. It does give you quite some amount of control (different guns and missiles, power repartition between shields, engines and guns, limited afterburner fuel, missile decoys, ...) but you still don't have to bother about things like landing (autopilot does it for you if you want, and even manually it's very easy).

The game itself game be hard, at least for the first two episodes (especially the add-ons). Starting with WC3 you can configure the difficulty in-flight, easily adjusting it even for just one mission if you're stuck.

As for the joystick, it's better to play with a joystick, but you can play it with keyboard and mouse - I initially played WC2 with a mouse, back then when I was a young teen and couldn't afford a joystick :p You basically just need a list of keyboard shortcuts (which can easily be found) to know how to access the various features of your ship (communication, guns/missiles, decoys, nav map, autopilot...) and the rest is pretty intuitive.

There is no real tutorial, but some of the games have simulators you can use when stationed in the carrier, and the games slowly increase the complexity of things - on the first missions, you don't need to fiddle with the navmap, don't need to use missiles or decoys, ...

Also you can do a lot of "trial and error", missions in Wing Commander tend to be pretty short (a few are longer, typically the last mission of the game is a multi-step longer mission), so it's not much an issue to die and try again. It's not like say Tie Fighter where some mission can take half an hour.

I've beaten every game in the series with mouse and keyboard (the WC1 expansions non-withstanding as they are hard as diamond) so don't worry too much about the controls. It's a very arcadey simulation.

Back in the 90's I could only afford to play this game with one of those cheap $10 plastic joysticks you'd find next to the shareware isle.

As others have pointed out, the action is more arcade than sim. However don't confuse this with your horrible modern day flight game where your missiles literally recharge and your fuel is endless.

Weapon load outs are limited. Once you're out of missiles, you're out. Once you've burnt out your fuel, you'll have no more afterburner (boost).

The branching campaign, and moral choices in the later games, are clear inspiration for what we see in modern games today such as The Witcher and Mass Effect. Your dialogue has an impact on the outcome of the game.

So to answer your question, you'll have no issue playing it with mouse and/or keyboard. If you can handle a classic first person shooter along the lines of Doom or Wolfenstein, you'll have no issue with this game. Or you can think of it as a poor man's Strike Commander (in terms of flight mechanics).

Just a word of advice: the first two games can be pretty infuriating at times, the sprites often make dogfighting and flying near large objects really difficult as their scale and orientation often don't quite match the distance, dimension or direction of the ship they represent, capital ship defence, torpedo runs (in the second game) and some of the more crowded dogfights can become an exercise in frustration.

Oh, and let's not forget the procedurally generated asteroid and mine fields, essentially instead of being a bunch of pre-existing objects in space they are generated on the fly, which means that the game throws asteroids and mines at you depending on your speed and direction, the problem is that the basic tactic of slowing down and change direction constantly doesn't always work (more than one mission ended abrutly because an undodgeable asteroid killed me) and while in many missions you can alter the order to visit the nav points to avoid asteroids there are missions in which you MUST go through asteroids or mines.