Warning: this game requires joystick. You will NOT be able to play without one. Though considering Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous you either already have it or at a very least: should be planning to get one. Quick review: SW: X-wing Alliance is one of the best space combat games to date. Great storyline (53 campaign missions!), tons of amazing fun flying legendary fighters and freighters (27 in total!), and combat... this game probably has the second-best arcade space combat, right after the Freespace 2. Truly an excellent game. I also recommend X-Wing Alliance Upgrade website (google is your friend) for tons of "upgrades" to the ship, such as higher details and additional destroyable hardpoints on a cap ships.
Arguably the best Star Wars cRPG game to date. Great storyline, epic battles, fun combat mechanics, inspiring and interesting worlds to explore along with tons and tons of things to do, some of the best mini-games ever in a Star Wars games. Perhaps companions are not as interesting as in the original KotOR, but at the same time everything else is better and... well: more of it! For anyone downloading the game I highly recommend playing it with The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod which adds plenty of missions, whole new planet (far from the most interesting in the game, but still: it's a whole new planet in an amazing game!) and most importantly: fixes tons of bugs that developers never got around to fix, and let me tell you this: most universal complain in reviews about this game were bugs... so I consider it a must-have for anyone playing KotOR II. Is playing prequel a must before trying this game? No, KotOR II is a complete, closed game, with everything explained, but much like the Witcher 2 - you will benefit a lot from knowing the events from prequel and save yourself some time reading explanations. That said though - for someone not really "into Star Wars" this game will appear having several quite obvious flaws. Combat isn't the best one ever, stories sometimes suffer from clear light-grey-dark side choices (though the dark side choices often tend to give some hilarious results), PC controls are clunky, graphics are far from the best even for the year game was released, and as mentioned before - bugs bugging out bugs in a vanilla version (special thanks to modders). But for me, in my very subjective review - this is the best Star Wars cRPG ever released. Great, complex storylines, tons of things to do, wonderful worlds, and something very few Star Wars cRPGs ever managed to capture: this feeling of living in a Star Wars universe and being a part of it, thrown into a turmoil of galactic events far greater than any individual. Must-play!
As other reviewers have pointed out - this game is good, but... just that. There's literally nothing I would call "great" in this game. It feels like a cheap clone of Fallout 2, only without all the awesomeness it had and with tons of small frustrations all around the game. Setting is good, and after first 25 hours of gameplay I would say that stories are... bumpy. With more downs than ups, sadly. So far the main plot seems to be the least interesting part of a game, and side-quests... good 80% of them are just grinds, nothing more. Kill the guys there, bring the part here, fix that, fix this... I'm freshly out of Fallout: New Vegas and that game had some grindy quests too, but Wasteland 2 feels like grinds on top of the grinds in comparasion. Then there is combat... if someone thinks that turn-based combat is a guarantee to interesting tactical encounters than he needs to think again and play this game. It's an excellent study on how you can make a game with long, dull combat. Oponents are divided into few types that repeat over and over again, activate in always the same way, follow always the same tactics and basically never, ever force you to adapt. It's just the same repetitive grind - cover, shoot, cover, shoot - over and over again with literally nothing to do in between. You had a thought of making non-combat character? Horrible idea - he'll be useless for a good majority of a game. Eg. you specialize in disarming alarms and you have someone that's useless 99% of time and when he can be used - in 3/4 cases it doesn't make a difference (eg. alarms placed in a middle of the enemy group that you have to kill anyway). And something that's annoying me most of all: ammunition, more precious than anything in the game for no good reason (even though NPCs got infinite supply of ammo). This game is riddle with some obscure design choices I can't even start describing due to char limit, but it does not make game fun or difficult or engaging, but rather.... grindy.
