The mission design, while very creative and varied, seems to be all over the place difficulty-wise.

Some missions seem almost impossible to do, or have to be played multiple times before you understand what you're supposed to be doing.

I hope IWar2 improves on this once i get around to it :(

Case in point .. the last mission.

Totally based on "luck" which systems get damaged on your ship.
Some combinations make it impossible to do what you need to do.
So you are forced to throw play-time away, based on that.

That's just bad design, sorry. Unless it's a bug of some kind on modern systems.
I'll still try to finish it though.

Actually .. i won't.
This is getting a little too silly now.
Youtube will have to do for the final cutscene i guess ..

Well .. turns out there are no videos of this on YouTube at this point :|
Cheats worked though. Sigh.

FWIW, i still like the game, despite all these problems.

Playing a bit of IWar2 now, i have to say .. the missions have improved somewhat, but also not really.

The extreme difficulty spikes are very much still there. Oh well, i guess it's just a hallmark of Particle Systems games in the end.

There is usually a way where the mission is not too hard.

Maybe, but it feels like having to try to find that one super specific thing to do, which is not very fun in the end.

As if the mission was designed to be done one a certain way and that's it, but you won't be told beforehand, but have to play the same mission over and over to find out what that specific approach is.

It's pretty tedious.

Yes tedious, why not check a walk-through when you get stuck and tired of looking for that one solution.

Oh, i've been doing that.
Still it's always a bit sad having to reach for walkthroughs.