Product Description

Take control of the fastest ship in the galaxy - the "Millennium falcon" as well as X-Wings, A-Wings, B-Wings and Corellian transports. Join the massive assautl on the fully operational second Death Star in the epic Battle of Endor. Immersive environments include true 3D cockpits - with full 360 degree views inside and out - as well as a true 3D hangar. Fifty story driven single player missions and flexible new multi-player options.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4831 in Video Games
• Brand: LucasArts
• Released on: 2002-04-15
• ESRB Rating: Everyone
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 95
• Format: CD-ROM
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .38" h x 4.88" w x 5.50" l, .20 pounds

Amazon.com Review
Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance casts you as the youngest son of the Azzameen family, a merchant dynasty operating in a galaxy far, far away. The game is set in the turbulent time period between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Caught amid increasing tensions between the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance, with business rivals watching for any sign of weakness, the Azzameens are on the edge of financial ruin. Worse, their Rebel sympathies may endanger their very survival.

As the family's newest pilot, you fly tutorial missions at first, under the supervision of your sister Aeron and the droid Emkay. But even as you are training, the situation heats up. Before long, the family has been betrayed, your space station has been seized, and you're forced to turn to the Rebellion. Though the game's focus is on combat, the development of this story is tight and suspenseful.

The story and the merchant/smuggler setting give the game plenty of variety. One mission may have you piloting a loaded freighter through an Imperial blockade, while another may place you in the cockpit of an X-Wing on a hit-and-run raid against an enemy battle station. Every ship, every weapon, every sound effect is pure Star Wars, totally faithful to the look--and feel--of the movies. This extends to the missions themselves: nothing works as planned, but somehow you and your Rebel allies manage to make it all the way to the climactic Battle of Endor. If you've distinguished yourself in the earlier missions, hot pilots will get the chance to take the controls of the Millennium Falcon and cram a torpedo into the gut of the Emperor's second Death Star.

Controlling the fighters, freighters, and transports in X-Wing Alliance is easy, with all the options you'd expect in a Star Wars simulation. Shield, engine, and weapon power levels are all adjustable, so you, too, can transfer all power to front deflector screens while attacking, or shut down power to weapons to outrun a swarm of TIE fighters. Novice players may find it difficult to control wingmen or to keep track of the changing objectives when missions go sour. But practice makes perfect, and the truly frustrated can simply skip up to three missions without penalty.

With a modest learning curve and graphics that put you right in the milieu of the Star Wars films, X-Wing Alliance will have you flying combat missions for the Rebel Alliance in no time--and loving every minute of it. --Alyx Dellamonica

Pros:

• Loving attention to detail
• Fantastic sound effects and John Williams's music
• Interesting and changing mission objectives
• Wide variety of spacecraft

• Occasional bugs within missions can render them unwinnable

Amazon.com Product Description
A neutral family is swept up in the struggle against the encroaching Empire. You must defy the strong-arm tactics of a rival family who 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'll find yourself at the controls of the legendary Millennium Falcon, flying against the massive Imperial fleet in the Battle of Endor.

GameSpot 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.

Customer Reviews

The Most Excellent Star Wars Game
I was a fan of the first X-Wing game, and, immediately purchased this game upon its release in 1999. The inclusion of the Battle of Endor at the end was the selling point. Ever since, I have not needed another computer game! The other reviews have pretty much spoken for the game's plot and basic features, so I won't comment on those. This game, despite its age, is simply one of the best flight simulator type game out there!

If there is one way to describe this game, its detail! From the complicated story, of which you feel a part of, to the 3-D ships, to all the stuff that happens in the missions it is simply incredible! In the heat of a difficult mission, I have often lost myself in the game, only to shudder when returning to reality!

There are over 50 different family business and Rebel Alliance missions. In these you fly YT-1300 (Milinium Falcon type) freighters, Z-95s, X-wings, A-Wings, B-Wings and Y-wings. Compared with all past games, there is alot of function. You can dock with capital ships, carry containers, operate gun turrets on the freighters and fly through space stations. Space battles are replicated down to the smallest details - sunglare, blast shockwave, large debris, even ejected pilots! You have the ability to communicate with the pilots in your squadron, and there is a variety of "comm chatter" that you get from them!

I have beaten the game twice (it takes a long, long time). The final treat is that you get to fly the Milinium Falcon in the Battle of Endor (the big space battle in Return of the Jedi), complete with a VERY challenging run through the Death Star's interior! Strap on your flight helmets...

In addition to the missions, there is a "flight simulator" section where you can review past tour of duty missions as well as create your own missions! Here you can fly most of the starfighters (Rebel, Imperial, Pirate, Civilian, etc.) see elsewhere in the game. There is a third "Pilot Proving Grounds" section where you can fly Rebel starfighters through a series of mazes and obstacles while competing for the best time. In between Tours, there are some excellent cut scenes. You also earn awards in the Rebel missions and gather various "souviners" during your family missions.

This review has gotten way too long and no one is going to read it anyways, however, X-Wing Alliance is a supurb effort put out by Lucas Arts Entertainment and is well worth the purchase!

Impressive
Besides being the latest (and likely last?) of the X-wing games, "Alliance" is also the best - bringing the series back from the hole it sat in after "X-wing v. Tie Fighter" to the epic trail blazed by the original "Tie Fighter". The real question though is whether its improvements make it worth getting to players who bought the older games. In "Alliance", you play the youngest son of family that owns an intergalactic shipping business. Moving stuff from system to system, you pilot freighters through lawless tracts of space. In a time of civil war, your family tries to stay neutral, even as it's split along pro-rebel and imperial-loyalist sides (guess which side you're on.) Despite its seemingly civilian trappings, the family business is all about combat - your ships come armed with turbo-lasers and ion-cannon and equipped with deflectors. Though you won't face imperials immediately, combat will come quickly - forcing you to fend off the Viraxo, your family's hostile rivals. As the war progresses, the Viraxo leap to the Empire's quarter, essentially forcing you to side with the rebellion, and making you trade your Corellian transport in for an X-wing fighter. Until then, the game offers a series of missions that modestly test skills you may have amassed if you've played the older SW Fighter's games, but are more likely intended as a tutorial. (On an interesting note, sci-fi fans may note a resemblance between the Viraxo fighters and the Angel fighters from "Captain Scarlet".) The game climaxes with the epic battle of Endor, in which you take on the 2nd Death Star from the inside (in a mission I like to refer to as "Operation watch-that-overpass!") As in older games, you fly alongside and against AI pilots, though they're more chatty than before (including a motor-mouthed droid named M-Kay who makes C3PO sound positively mute) making the dialog sound more natural than it should.

"Alliance" is a bit of a disappointment - its ties to the original "X-Wing" of 1994 are painfully clear in terms of graphics and gameplay - this is still about flying canned missions in linear order in which you must complete by fulfilling a set of specific goals (i.e., no matter how many Tie Fighters you swat down, all Lambda Shuttles must dock with the medical frigate; all of the Correlian cruisers must survive; you must inspect every container; etc...). Some of the mission-critical goals seem counterintuitive - resulting from pre-scripted twists in a given mission. For example, when a friendly ship becomes disabled, its crew is forced to abandon it, and you to destroy it - you only figure out that second part after numerous post-mission-failure messages. Even so, once you've figured out what to do and begun blasting the abandoned friendly to space-dust, your wingmen warn you that you're firing on a friendly, and that mission critical craft are under attack. Because a lot of in-game dialog is pre-scripted, which means that it's the same no-matter how you're doing, it's harder to tell whether you're doing well or not.

Graphics and sound are improved, though I guess we expected that. The big news is that you can now pad-lock those enemies or mission-critical craft - which is great not only for improving your situational awareness, but also because you can view the insides of your ship's flight-deck (this is a huge leap over previous games which essentially gave you 2-D renderings of the same flight panels we've seen since 1994). While shading and lensing effects are also added, I usually get to focused on the enemy to really appreciate them. I'm also not enough of an audiophile to comment on the sound, though the sound effects and John Williams score remain as expectedly faithful to the films as we've come to expect. The mission areas seem larger, and you now seem to have even larger numbers of enemies to fight against (clouds of fighters instead of just swarms). Also, you may now have to zoom into different areas (via hyperspace buoy) in a single mission - although I just find that increases the chances of running into bugs that make missions unwinnable.

The game's most revolutionary improvement isn't technical at all - relying on a story that (at first) makes you more than just another faceless rebel flyboy. (Looks like somebody at "Totally Games" fired up a copy of the orginal "Tie Fighter", and was reminded why that game was so much more popular then "X-Wing".) Instead your fight is for survival against greedy competitors, soon to become a personal vendetta against the empire. Characters you meet between missions, including M-Kay and other vengeful relatives, advance the plot and keep it focused throughout successive missions. If anything, the story could have kept you out of the rebellion a bit longer, or at least made the transition a tad smoother - the story loses something once you become a rebel pilot, though manages to hold onto you anyway.

With the passage of time, most PC's should run this game without problems. I played it on my P4, having no WinXP compatibility problems. The game probably supports OpenGL graphics acceleration (if it doesn't, it's doing the greatest impression of hardware acceleration I've ever seen). In short, an X-Wing battle-sim that's guaranteed to please, though obviously pleasing most those who've never tried one before.

Good Space Flight Sim
A space simulation game like 'Wing Commander', Alliance throws you into the Rebellion between 'The Empire Strikes Back' and 'Return of the Jedi' films. As with all such games a good flight controller is strongly recommended. The real innovation is there are two games in one. You play a a space merchant whose family business is attacked and almost destroyed by a rival merchant. After you join the rebellion mission are split between family and the rebellion with about one family mission for every three rebellion ones. While at the end you save the family business there a couple loose threads aren't wrapped up. The rebellion mission end with you destroying the Death Star's reactor in the Millennium Falcon.

I did have one issue: As a DirectX 6 game it would only use software rendering on my DirectX 7 box until I manually changed the game's ini file.