Star Wars TIE FIGHTER - PC Game Review

metal Jesus I'm back again this week with a a video game review I've been wanting to bring to you for quite a while and that is the mid 90s LucasArts classic TIE fighter this is an awesome Star Wars game and if you ask a bunch of old-school gamers like me what's your favorite Star Wars game well if TIE fighter is not at least at number one it's almost always in the top 5 the bummer is that it only came out on dos and windows never came out on consoles so there's an entire generation of gamers out there that just haven't played this game and that's a complete shame I can't let that go so this week I'm really thrilled to bring you this review and what's cool about this game is it's a combat flight sim kind of similar to Wing Commander but it's way more than that and one of my favorite things about it is that you actually play on the side of the Empire you are a TIE fighter pilot fighting for the Imperials against the rebels which is really cool I mean in this game Darth Vader and the Emperor are your boss how cool is that let's take a look [Music] TIE fighter was released by LucasArts in 1994 for das and in about a year later it was released on cd-rom and a collector's edition that's actually the version I'm showing right now and that was released in 1995 you know I'm tempted to say that if you've played Wing Commander that you will be pretty familiar with TIE fighter the difference is that TIE fighter actually is a space combat simulator an emphasis on simulator as a matter of fact I would go so far to say that this game is about as complex as some traditional flight simulators and it's got a crazy amount of controls and buttons and that's part of its charm but it's also got a pretty high learning curve even now our capable forces led by Darth Vader are striking back at the rebel insurgents [Music] unprepared for our attack signal bites Admiral Thrawn to launch eyes Hortons immediately in the game you play as a rookie TIE fighter pilot assigned to the Imperial Navy and you're trying to maintain order in the galaxy and also control any civil disobedience that may arise this game takes place almost immediately after the Battle of Hoth as a matter of fact in this game the main villain is the Rebel Alliance which as everyone knows from the movies is the Luke Skywalker characters the Han Solo character so they are the villains in this game and I love how this game actually refers to them as terrorists we captured a freighter full of rebels trying to escape from the planet whof whof a nearby ice planet was the main base of the rebels the recent imperial attack on this base has driven their forces into flight the interrogation of these rebel prisoners should help us track more of them down now it's also worth noting two fans of the Star Wars universe that this game fits in right around the time of the heir to the Empire novels and uses many of those plot elements so it's kind of cool it fits into the two the main Star Wars narrative very well now you might be tempted to compare the game to say star fox or Wing Commander but TIE fighter really is more of a space combat simulator albeit within the Star Wars universe so even though it's kind of fantasy related you know you're in zero-g gravity yet like the the TIE fighters turn in like an airplane by the way any chance I get to play with Star Wars toys I'm down with I think what I'm really getting at here is that there's just a ton of keys that you have to manage while playing the game for instance you really have to pay attention to the energy distribution between your shields and your weapons now the Empire really designed the TIE fighter to be almost disposable so the Empire would throw tons of these things at the rebels expecting them not to survive very long especially in the beginning of the game so very early on in the game you have to make a choice do you want shields or do you want lasers and I'll tell you what making that choice in heavy combat is kind of a scary one because you really get the sense that your TIE fighter is pretty weak especially in the beginning of the game when you're flying the basic one but it's very satisfying to survive and actually make a difference in a battle the civil war that has ravaged your planets is over it is time to lay down your arms join us to rebuild all that was destroyed in this savage conflict even now another aspect that you have to really manage is the engine speed and what I mean by that is that you can go 100% full speed all the time but the problem is is that these battles are fairly complex and so often you will simply die just by clipping your wing on something accidentally so surprisingly I'm always monitoring and managing my speed and there's a really nice feature in this where you can just hit the enter key and that matches the speed of your target now speaking of targets another aspect of this game is target management and like I mentioned before these are pretty intense dogfights there's a lot going on on both sides you're almost never alone and so knowing where everything is both the capital ships and everything else is key there's also cargo ships there's all sorts of stuff going on and managing your targets is a big part of success in TIE fighter the fleet under my command is willing to join the Rebel Alliance or price very interesting a troop we have great need for officers of your caliber here's what I propose the main game is fairly long there are seven tours of duty and each of those sections has at least four missions to it so there's plenty to dig into and enjoy each mission has a primary and secondary objective so you don't have to do the secondary ones and there's a really interesting bonus objective that shows up occasionally now that's given to you by this really shadowy character that hides on deck and you'll talk to him and you find out actually that he speaks for the Emperor now this is really interesting part of the game and it's totally optional but basically the Emperor suspects that one of the higher-ups in the Imperial Navy is secretly helping the rebels and so if you want to you can join his inner circle and get a little bit more of the story it's actually really really cool do as your commander orders but pay attention to everything around you inspect the cargo contents of the convoy if you get the opportunity Admiral Hawke hogs performance so far has not been all the Emperor had hoped for conflicting reports give us reason to believe everything is not as it seems in this civil war in addition to the main story there's actually a really fun little I guess you'd call it maybe a mini game it's an obstacle course that you can run through completely at your leisure if you want to and essentially what you do is you choose a type of TIE fighter that you want to run through this and you try to get through it as quickly as possible because time is running down through the different legs and there's these little nodules that you can shoot that will add time to your run and I don't know it's just really fun really well made and it would be a fantastic game on its own you can also explore a film room which is kind of neat if you choose to record your battles you can watch them back here and actually move the camera around and see them from different angles there is a tech room which allows you to view 3d models of different ships throughout the game and there's also a combat simulator in case you're getting stuck and maybe frustrated with a new type of TIE fighter that you're not with the evidence you have gathered for us has been incredibly important shuttle umlauts passenger was a member of the Rebel Alliance the individual was taken directly to Admiral Harkov and they have been alone ever since this is very alarming in light of our investigation into the chronic shortages of equipment reported by Hawk oov it seems clear he is selling imperial weapons and supplies to whoever has the credits even the rebel traitors now in Thai fighter came out it got almost universal acclaim and this was coming off of a pretty big game which was the x-wing game so they took a lot of what they did right with x-wing and then they just brought it over to TIE fighter and the two games match up pretty well it's definitely a very cool series so that's my review of the PC classic TIE fighter if you haven't been able to tell already I love this game I had so much fun playing through it again after all these years for this review of so much fun and I'd love to see the developers bring this back on you know current consoles or current hardware to be so cool it's such a great great game alright I want to thank you for watching my channel thank you for subscribing take care grrrrrr argh

Channel: MetalJesusRocks

Views: 48,335

Rating: 4.9315405 out of 5

Keywords: metal jesus rocks, metaljesusrocks, metal, jesus, console, tie, fighter, star, wars, review, gameplay, video, game, history, retro, retrospective, gaming, lucasarts, dos, flight, simulator, darth, vader, imperial, empire, dosbox, sith, Star Wars, Games, Jedi, MS-DOS (Operating System)

Id: w3XHo3zQrjA

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/metaljesusrocks]

Tie Fighter by LucasArts is one of the best Star Wars games ever made, yet largely ignored by most modern gamers. This classic space combat sim lets you play as Emperor Palpatine's lap dog …and you'll love every minute of it! Damn those Rebel scum!