Star Wars: X-Wing Vs. TIE Fighter

The Good
I liked the graphics, improved engine, sound - it is all very good and lived up to my expectations. The multiplayer is brilliant and I have had many hours of fun out of it with my friends or over the internet. It is a near flawless engine for multiplayer gaming and can give you a lot of amusement and strategy.

The Bad
I didn't like the lack of single player support - Although people tend to forget that this game is designed for multiplayer, not single player - and if you want to play on your own, play the original X-Wing or TIE Fighter games.

The Bottom Line
I like it - many people don't, but I do - It is designed as a multiplayer game, so if you want some fun over a LAN in a Star Wars environment with simple goals - play this.

The Good
This was a very brave attempt to create a multiplayer-only game in the Star Wars universe, a few years before Quake III Arena and Unreal: Tournament made the multiplayer-only genre a convincing success. On its face it seemed like a good idea. Everybody wants to fly an X-Wing. Everybody wants to beat their friends.

I write this from the perspective of the UK, where in 1997 most people who had private internet access only had a modem, and the game was not a great hit. Doom and Quake were popular online, but that was because students could play them on university computers because Doom and Quake did not require a joystick. It was hard to smuggle a joystick into university without attracting attention. And nobody wanted to because, compared to the previous games in the series, X-Wing vs TIE Fighter was an enormous let-down.

The positive. The graphics were quite attractive in their day, adding texture maps to the simple Gouraud shading of TIE Fighter. Some of the models had an impressive sense of scale. Because this was released in the earliest days of hardware acceleration it did not have 3D card support out of the box. You had to download a patch, which tended to make the textures look blurry. As I write these words there are no screenshots for the game because no-one liked it, and also I believe it ran under DOS. I have no idea if it will run on modern hardware.

This is the "what I liked about this game" section.

The Bad
The game was not developed by the same team behind TIE Fighter, and it showed. The space combat was very poor, because the AI opponents were very obviously perfect, but slowed down slightly so as to simulate human flaws. They could sense your crosshairs and react to you, even from a great distance. They did not miss. Playing the game with bots was hilarious, because the computer opponents were so perfectly alike they would blow each other up at exactly the same time. The single-player missions were perfunctory. The missions were played individually. There was no ongoing storyline, no plot at all.

And as a multi-player game the idea was flawed. Space is not an ideal venue for multi-player action because it is empty. There is no real cover and very little eye candy. The game tried to alleviate this by including asteroid fields, but they were spartan. Because the game was set in space - unlike a traditional flight simulator - there were no clouds, mountains, no gravity. As a multiplayer experience the basic gameplay was no different to ancient 3D space shooter games such as Star Raiders, but without any of the depth.

The Bottom Line
A brave try that failed on every level. It didn't even have a Star Wars vibe; the intro movie - which was rendered rather than being animated, as per previous titles - looked like something from Star Trek, and the polish that we had come to expect from Lucasarts was completely missing. After the triumphant TIE Fighter it was a particularly unimpressive effort. With one exception the company seemed to give up on space combat games entirely after this.

The Good
Graphically it's stunning, a notable improvement of X-Wing and TIE-Fighter, taking advantage of 3D graphics cards. The control is also as slick as ever, though are now dozens more commands to be assigned than before. There is excellent support for joysticks, and you really do need a 4 button + throttle + POV hat joystick to keep from getting swamped.

On a basic level, it's also a lot of fun to fly around. It's still the same basic game as X-Wing, just further developed. Flying through an asteroid field can be a tense experience. There's also a well developed scoring system, which awards points for everything you do as a pilot. The more points you earn, the more awards and promotions you get. For a multiplayer game this is great as the whole world can see how good you are just by looking at your rating.

The Bad
This game should be great, but I'm afraid it just plain sucks. Despite it's obvious technical advances, it's just not fun the play. There is practically no single player game to this at all, other than standard training missions. There is no plot what-so-ever, it's just a space combat frag-fest, that gets dull fast.

The mutiplayer side of the game seems to offer some reprieve, but it's damn hard to find folk to fly against you. You can of course do the team missions, where you all gang up against a common foe, but the difficulty level is just too high. Unless the entire party of pilots are experts, the whole things is over with every man destroyed in a few minutes. Basically, not fun and very frustrating.

Additionally, one final gripe. In the stats section it lists stats for all the various ships and fighters you can meet on your travels. But all their figures disagree with the previous games, and other Star Wars resource material. For example, according to this game, a Star Destroyer is 3200m long, but according to everyone else it's 1600m long. Who's right? All the countless games and material that has gone before, or this one game.

The Bottom Line
Annoying, frustrating, pointless. There's no plot for a single player game, it's too hard for a team game, and unless you can find several like-minded expert starfighter pilots to play with, I'd leave this one well alone.

The Good
Story: Why bother with this section, honestly throw me a bone here....what do we have? The whole game has very little meat in the story line side of things. In fact lets call that meat: tofu. There is no story what so ever.

Menu: A nice data pad style with ok background graphics that "set the mood" along with music that is a bit too off theme.

Graphics: The ships are nice, very nice, although for the experienced old timers of the X-wing and TIE fighter series you realise that these models are taken directly from the old games and have been given a repaint and A.I tweak then shoved into the outside world. The cockpits are the exact same ones from the old games, save the text being retyped so that it is neater and the targeting screen much larger and more informal (Flashes of TIE fighter there) Then there is space, the stars appear to kind of drop when you roll or move, not slide slowly, they do that, but fall a few inches then start rolling, as I played even more I realised that this was the old X-wing engine, but with new lighting and effects. The nebulas are not pretty to look at, play X-wing Alliance for nebulas. The ships are all done nicely but there seems to be some weird texture on them that gives them a grotty look, not nice. That can be changed in the menu. Explosions are very basic, the same bang for all of the different craft. But at least they kept the random destruction of the craft from TIE fighter.

Sound: All from the older games, just thank god they were all cleaned or this game would be on Ebay before you could say "Super Star Destroyer" But there are only 7 tracks in the sound track and about 4 are used in the main game. Nope nope nope.

Gameplay: MUCH better than the other game, My joystick could be customised so that different buttons could do different things, at least they go that right. For some odd reason the S-foils button has been turned form S to V?? And why is does the N key when pressed states that I don't have a SLAM engine?? The A.I is much better, the wingmen do not become peace meal when attacked. And the shield and laser adjustment rate is still there. Then there is the Multi player, Melees, Tournaments and other weird but fun games that can be played off or online.

The Bad
Ok the game had no plot, none at all. It made some pitiful attempt with the battle modes, the multiplayer was only good with Human Intelligence, I found myself beating "Top Ace" pilots in the skirmish. The missions are bloody hard with unfair enemies that sport shields at 200%. After a while you realise that this is all just TIE fighter with a splash of X-wing thrown in with repaints, some good most bad. A rather good multiplayer makes up for this game that I am glad I got for a lower price ($20.00 AUS from Amazon.com)

The Bottom Line
For the dire and die hard of the Star Woids (Star Wars fans) Fun for a quick romp when you are stuck on something more fun (X-wing alliance).