The mission is not the most riveting in the mission compendium, but it did raise the bar on mission design going forward. The premise is solid, the design is solid, the briefings have actually been proofread, and there's a custom voice pack! Excellent work, Hawk - I look forward to seeing more of the X-Wing in TIE Fighter project.

This mission is for competitions, to put it bluntly. You fly against a never-ending series of NR ships, working your way up from Z-95s. The plot and briefing are actually pretty good and make it fairly memorable, but I did find it to be a very frustrating mission. Why? Well, even on hard the enemy can't hit the broad side of a barn. You're actually in very little danger of getting shot down. Unfortunately, the enemy AI is pretty bad at flying, too, and tends to fly right into your unshielded TIE while you're dogfighting. This would be less annoying if you weren't captured and your pilotfile wiped if you did. The only way to complete the mission, at least for me, is to play for X minutes and then quit. I did several 20+ minute runs but kept dying to debris or ramming, so the pilot I submitted for the comp was only a 5 minute run because I was too frustrated to waste my time trying for better.

It's a great concept, but it needs tweaking or perhaps porting to XvT.

I had a some issues with this battle. First, there's the length. 14 missions is too long, and things that might have been minor annoyances slowly balloon into major frustrations. There's a lot of dead time. The first mission, as already mentioned, is just the first mission of TIE Fighter - it's a cute idea, but the battle is such a slog it's hard to justify adding another mission, especially when everyone flying this has already done it. Mike's briefings are uniformly terrible and all of the text is filled with errors - I can cut the author some slack on that, but the TAC should have taken care of that during testing. Ship choice, both for you and your enemies, is frequently baffling - Imperials fly X-Wings, you do interception duty in a gunboat, and in one mission the NR sends out TIEs.

I think many of the missions are just repackaged Tiss & Mike missions from elsewhere in the database. I'd stick to the Free missions if I were you.

I'm tempted to give it a 0 just to help cancel out the perfect ratings given by the author's brother, girlfriend, subordinates, and the man himself, but that's probably overkill.