Parkan series: Lost and forgotten Russian space sims (has anyone here ever played them?)

[DesolationStone]

Parkan: The Imperial Chronicles
Parkan: Iron Strategy
Parkan 2

For some obscure reason, I have the second game in this small series in my Steam library. I haven't found much information on the internet, so I'm curious if anyone has actually played these games and wants to share their experiences about them. If I understand correctly, they were the first space sims games to actually support a hybrid gameplay between flight and fps sections (the first one is also very similar to System Shock now that I'm looking at it).

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i play and sort of like/enjoy all the games with spaceships. i routinely hoard all the parkan keys when they're gifted in order for no one else to ever have to suffer them. it's all you need to know.

 

[Demo.Graph]

Parkan TIC is great. I'd finished it twice. OST is short, but great.
Iron Strategy is very uneven (badly balanced), but very atmospheric. OST by Pavel Stebakov was p. kewl.
Iron Strategy 2 has better gameplay, but worse plot (too convoluted for Parkan, more animu-style). Also, worse OST.
Parkan 2 is a pure decline. The elevator music is kinda okay... ish. Nikita (dev) went into mobile games and never went back.

 

[jebsmoker]

parkan 1 is a somewhat uneven, but otherwise interesting merge of doom's and elite's mechanics - although the official English localization that 1C did for the US/UK market is memorable for all the wrong reasons

it's not very good, but it's humorously bad - the Russian to English translation was more or less butchered, so it'll stick with you for that reason

 

[Hydro]

I kinda enjoyed TIC in my teens for it was pretty creepy and claustrophobic. It was hard for me to comprehend the gameplay with all its derpiness, still I liked the atmosphere and that Star Citizen freedom lol

 

[Parsimonious cook]

I played Parkan a whole lot way back in the day (one Czech gaming mag had the full version on a CD back in the day and it had very good Czech translation), the game was p. gud though it sure was complex to the point of being obtuse sometimes. I loved how you could board any enemy ship during space combat especially, that is a feature that very few (if any) space games have. The colony building/management part was also kinda interesting.

I played Iron Strategy for a bit, but never really got into it. Same with Parkan 2, which I thought wasnt nowhere as good as the first one.

 

[GaelicVigil]

Never played the first one, but I have tried several times to get into Parkan 2. I want to like it, I just can't get past the jank to get very far.

Although I am curious to know if anyone who's played it for a while knows what the evolving galaxy actually means?

 

[Demo.Graph]

what the evolving galaxy actually means?

It means that it was a popular marketing pitch. It means nothing. IIRC, there're plot-based faction allegiance switches and maybe some changes of enemy spawns.
None of the Parkan games are sandboxes, they're plot-based games with some elements of free roaming and base-building.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Well, you can take over planetary bases and develop them (which create resources for you to pick up when you stop by) and those colonies in turn can be attacked by pirates - I guess that this might be what the devs meant. The same thing was in the original Parkan too. But yeah, its mostly just marketing buzzwords.

 

[GaelicVigil]

Any tips on how to get Imperial Chronicles to run properly? The only way I can even get it to run at all in Windows 11 is via dgVoodoo using x32 D3D settings, but the intro video won't show and it's touchy as hell.

I heard you can run over Windows 98 in DosBox, but that's only a road of last resort.

Edit: I'm going to attempt to setup Windows 98 over Winbox for 86Box. I think native Win98 is going to be the only way to get this game to run properly.

 

[motherfucker]

Any tips on how to get Imperial Chronicles to run properly? The only way I can even get it to run at all in Windows 11 is via dgVoodoo using x32 D3D settings, but the intro video won't show and it's touchy as hell.

I heard you can run over Windows 98 in DosBox, but that's only a road of last resort.

Edit: I'm going to attempt to setup Windows 98 over Winbox for 86Box. I think native Win98 is going to be the only way to get this game to run properly.

GOG version claims to be compatible with Win10

 

[jebsmoker]

i can testify that the GOG re-release of Parkan 1 is compatible with Windows 10