From the Manufacturer
A neutral family fights for its business--and its survival--and is swept up in the struggle against the encroaching Empire. You must defy the strong-arm tactics of a rival family that will stop at nothing to destroy your trading company. Ultimately, you will join the Rebel Alliance for a series of covert assignments and uncover information about the Empire's second Death Star project. The finale? You will find yourself at the controls of the legendary Millennium Falcon, flying against the massive Imperial fleet in the Battle of Endor. X-Wing Alliance puts you right in the middle of the epic Star Wars conflict--and takes space combat excitement to new heights.
Features:
* Take control of the fastest ship in the galaxy, the Millennium Falcon, as well as X-wings, A-wings, B-wings, Y-wings, and other Corellian transports.
* Join the massive assault on the fully operational second Death Star in the epic Battle of Endor.
* Fifty story-driven single-player missions and flexible new multiplayer options.
* Fly into the interior of the complex objects including starships, asteroids, a salvage yard, and to the core of the Death Star for the first time in a Star Wars space combat game.
* New skirmish mode lets you set your own mission parameters (number of ships, types of ships, targets, and more) to create many customized single and multiplayer conflicts.
* State-of-the-art space combat experience with updated graphics, special effects, and expanded battles on an incredibly vast scale.
* Immersive playing environment including true 3-D cockpits--with full 360-degree views inside and out--as well as a true 3-D hangar.
* Rich soundtrack fills out the experience by including extensive new recorded dialog, dynamic audio that interacts with game events, original Star Wars music, and authentic sound effects.
Review
X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter was one of the most anxiously anticipated and yet ultimately most disappointing games of 1997. While the addition of multiplayer features was welcome, most players were displeased that Totally Games and LucasArts focused exclusively on providing a multiplayer dogfighting arena and completely abandoned the plot-rich gameplay that made previous games in the series so addictive. The Balance of Power expansion pack responded to most of the complaints that gamers had concerning X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, but by the time it arrived on retail shelves, most players had already moved on to other games.
While the campaigns of the previous games in the series put you in the role of a relatively nondescript fighter pilot and let you participate in some of the key events depicted in the first two Star Wars movies, X-Wing Alliance features a more ambitious campaign. You play as Ace Azzameen, the youngest son in a family of merchant traders who are destined to become embroiled in the growing conflict between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire. Just as your character's family and associates have begun to embrace the cause of the Alliance, a rival trading clan, the Viraxo, has sought to ally itself with factions of the Empire.
During the missions in which you control a transport, you'll be responsible for docking with and transporting various containers, but otherwise mission objectives aren't particularly original, generally requiring you to escort and defend key ships, eliminate all the fighters and other defenses in a target area, inspect all the ships in a convoy, and so on. The mission design is extremely varied and almost uniformly excellent, as almost all of the missions involve a few unique twists, and frequently your objectives will change in response to unforeseen events. Similarly, instead of inundating you with the same three or four repetitive wingmen taunts, most of the dialogue in X-Wing Alliance is uniquely scripted for each mission.
Involuntarily triggering a scripted event too soon can render a mission unwinnable, and occasionally the mission dialogue will progress as if you've completed all of your required chores within an area, although you'll subsequently discover (by reading a "mission failure" screen, if you're not keeping a close eye on the status of your mission objectives in your HUD) that you omitted an important task.
X-Wing Alliance uses a modified version of the X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter engine, and core gameplay is substantially similar in both games. Ships are more maneuverable at one-third of their maximum speed, and effectively allocating energy to your craft's weapons, shields, or engine in response to new circumstances is vital to successfully completing most missions. The game's larger battles can now involve dozens of fighters, and since fighters remain quite fragile, situational awareness is more crucial than ever.
The game's interface has been modified from the one used by X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, presumably to make more information readily available to you. The horribly cartoonish cockpit artwork used by X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter has been replaced with far less intrusive semitransparent versions, but I suspect that most players will still turn the cockpit off to maximize their view of the gameworld. A padlock view has been added to let you quickly track your target's location relative to your craft, but activating the padlock view also annoyingly automatically turns your cockpit art back on, regardless of your previous setting.
Using an external view of a ship, you can zoom right in until you can see the pilots in considerable detail. Overall, the graphics are considerably brighter in tone, and less over the top, than those used in Descent: Freespace or Wing Commander Prophecy. 3D sound effects are also supported but are somewhat buggy in the initial release of the game, and LucasArts has indicated that it is working on a patch to fix various 3D sound issues. Competent force-feedback effects are also included, but they are not as well implemented as they are in Descent Freespace or the current version of Independence War. There are a dozen new and generally well-done animated cutscenes littered throughout the campaign, and in keeping with the more character-oriented nature of this installment in the series, these scenes occasionally depict key individuals from the game (and the movies) as opposed to those in Balance of Power, which just showed spaceships. Unfortunately, the tilted but generally unmoving heads used to portray characters are quite unconvincing, and the characters all look like clones of one another. While the introductory cutscene is particularly good, the final ones essentially just reproduce, less effectively, key scenes from the end of Return of the Jedi. The concluding scene is particularly brief and anticlimactic. Between missions you can enter a simulator to replay previous missions or to create your own skirmish engagements using the built-in mission editor. Once your character joins the Rebellion, you can also review a technical library that displays key information on all known craft, or you can prove your prowess on various training courses designed to test your flying and shooting skills. You'll earn a series of medals and promotions during the course of the campaign, and in many missions you'll also pick up mementos that will be prominently displayed in your quarters, eventually transforming your home into a junkyard of trinkets.
For this concluding chapter in its series of space sims based upon the initial Star Wars trilogy, the development team has brought back all the ships featured in other games in the series, including the deadly TIE defenders and missile boats (although the latter fail to make an appearance in the campaign), and also created a large number of new ones for the use of the myriad of smugglers and civilians that appear in the game. X-Wing Alliance lets you play skirmish or proving-ground racing missions multiplayer, but the failure to include a cooperative multiplayer mode for the campaign is inexplicable and a major disappointment, especially considering Balance of Power fully supported multiplayer campaigns. The player-ratings system is still extremely punitive for players who prefer to battle AI opponents, even on the hardest difficulty level, instead of less-predictable, but often less-adept, human adversaries.
Unfortunately, while playing many of the missions near the end of the campaign, I couldn't help but feel that the game was rushed out to allow LucasArts adequate time to focus attention on its upcoming games based upon Episode I. Promised features, such as the ability for two players to simultaneously fly in a transport, were ultimately excluded. Even though the campaign is completely linear, there are several scripting errors that result in your character prematurely receiving awards or e-mail messages for missions that haven't yet been completed. The story-driven campaign ultimately lacks meaningful closure, and even the epic Battle of Endor is somewhat unfulfilling, although the final mission is highly original and well done. In spite of these flaws, most of which are quite minor, X-Wing Alliance's huge story-driven campaign, detailed and varied missions, enhanced graphics and sound, capable mission creator, and multiplayer features collectively make it a very good game and a solid conclusion to the series.--Desslock
--Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot Review
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