Big bitmapped background images of planets and galaxies and so forth make outer space look downright tacky, and the ship designs in the game run the range from plain to just plain ugly. Sure, you'll get a smooth frame rate out of it if you've got a decent system, but even at 60 frames a second, ships still look like they turn into corn flakes and cotton balls when they explode. If anything, at least Ares Rising goes to show that 3D-accelerator support doesn't automatically equate to good graphics. Ares Rising offers a solid flight engine, a detailed story, a nonlinear campaign, and a slew of multiplayer features, but its graphics restrain it from any measure of greatness. It's a game whose visuals look worse than the first batch of polygonal space sims like X-Wing and Wing Commander III. So in light of these recent successes, it's difficult to take Ares Rising too seriously. To that extent, several recent contenders in the genre not only look incredible, but offer sophisticated gameplay to match - Wing Commander: Prophecy, Descent: Freespace, and Independence War all combine top-notch flight dynamics with stunning visual effects, the illusion of relativistic speed, and awe-inspiring scale. After all, the goal of the genre is to accurately re-create what it might be like to fly a spacecraft, a goal that's become all the more approachable recently with the advent of powerful 3D graphics accelerators. Although a plausible physics model, fast action, and even a good story are components whose importance are not to be understated, when you get right down to it, a space flight sim is only as good as it looks. It cannot be wrong to generalize that, much like the first-person shooter, the space flight simulation is a genre whose visual presentation is critical to its overall quality.
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