Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance (Jewel Case)
by LucasArts Entertainment
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Video Game Reviews of Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance (Jewel Case)
Customer Review: Impressive
Summary: 4 Stars
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.
Customer Review: game ...
Summary: 2 Stars
all right, lets not get too negative, but what can I say? the graphics are the only part of this game that is good. the levels are ludicrous in the fact that your allies turn on you. then there is a little thing i like to call a storyline, which this game lacks. bottom line, don't spent money on this junk.Customer Review: X-wing Alliance Rocks
Summary: 5 Stars
I think this is an excelant game,this game has excellant graphics, it is one of my favorite games.I only have two complantes about this game.I wish there were more missions like star wars tie fighter,and also when I first bought this game I was not good at it and I thought were's the rebel missions when I finally got to the rebel missions I found out there were more azameen missions but over all this is an excellant gameCustomer Review: Excellent game
Summary: 5 Stars
I love the X-wing series and this was an excellent finale to it. The single player game was fun and the multiplayer was fun too. It's become a bit dated now as the graphics are a little old but it's hard to find any other space sim that's better.Customer Review: Older game, but still very fun!
Summary: 5 Stars
The graphics were a pleasant surprise...they look very clean and detailed. The story is neat, and there are a ton of different ships to pilot in single and multiplayer modes.If you enjoyed the other XW series games (except XW vs. TF, because that was just horrible), you should seriously consider picking this one up. It barely costs anything now, and it's an entertaining title.