STAR WARS™: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter

First of all. If you have never touched a X-Wing Title, this is not where you should start. Go get X-Wing Alliance. XvT is designed to be a Multiplayer title, yet has no support for multiplayer aside from Hamachi. Until a Lobby system is implemented, the Game is a Single Player experience. The Single Player Experience is however pretty damn good with a bunch of stand-alone missions and two Campaigns including Super Star Destroyers, B-Wings, Z-95s and TIEs. Not my choice of recommendation for first X-Wing game but if you want more after X-Wing Alliance, this is where you should go.

X-wing Vs. TIE Fighter and its Balance of Power expansion is perhaps the most difficult entry in the X-wing series. With more of an eye towards cooperative and competitive multiplayer than its successor, X-wing Alliance, a central storyline is somewhat sacrificed in favor of pure, unfettered gameplay. Featuring a unique balance that has only one or two glaring issues (looking at the Y-wing here), players should have a blast in cutthroat free-for-all melee tournaments and cinematic battles alike. The AI and strategy featured here is some of the best I've seen in space sims, forcing players to adapt to waves of fightercraft on multiple vectors, with each flight both running interference towards the player and pursuing their main objective. Capping it all off is some fantastic sound design, voicework, and the traditional Star Wars score. tl;dr? Buy this piece of gaming history and enjoy a real challenge.

I love X-Wing, Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance. Played them all through to completion including their sequels but as a single-player focused person, this game is severely lacking. It has no real traditional campaign to speak of, not in the sense of the other games, but rather you just play a series of missions. The campaign honestly feels like a huge afterthought, or tacked-on, this was a multiplayer-focused game and as such I just cannot really recommend it.

X-Wing vs. Tie is a terrific LAN party game. After fighting through the hassles of Windows Firewalls (the game cannot be alt-tabbed), and compatibility modes, the network code was flawless. A joystick is required to play. We played the mission after mission of the Rebel Campaign. There is also an Imperial campaign that we have not tried. We had white-knuckle moments fending off waves of Tie fighters while slaughtering bombers and racing to shoot down the last proton torpedo before it hits the transports. During the rare lulls, a blue on blue dogfight would sometimes break out. The missions we've played through were varied, and went straight to the action. In order to support multiplayer, Lucasarts wisely dropped the "inspect 100 crates" missions that plague other X-Wing games. What's left is not a mindless shoot 'em up. Many missions require a bit of planning and coordination, and it's this team work that makes the co-op play satisfying.

This game is as much fun as I remember but I keep constantly having a problem whereby the game crashes the first time you receive the "mission complete" message. When you've spent 20 minutes or more completing a mission this is incredibly frustrating!