X-Wing Alliance - Retro Review - Good as TIE Fighter?

if you have been hankering for the days of TIE fighter and x-wing and you were let down with x-wing vs. TIE fighter like most people because it didn't have a single-player until they added and added in the balance of power campaign later on you might be tempted to check out x-wing Alliance this is a game that came out in about 1999 you can get it for pretty cheap maybe you got it in the Humble Bundle like I did for very cheap along with galactic battlegrounds and Star Wars rebellion but how does this game hold up now it's nice that we can play it very easily it runs in steam you can easily hook up a joystick joysticks are pretty cheap I highly recommend getting them and not messing around with remapping controllers and all that crap well this game offers a few improvements I wouldn't say improvements from TIE fighter I'm not gonna really talk about x-wing vs. TIE fighter because TIE fighter is the gold standard it offered a few additions you start off from a neutral standpoint for a family of traders and they're deciding from an outsider's perspective whether to lean towards the rebellion or the Empire this takes place after the first Death Star has been exploded it takes place after the rebels have evacuated from Hoth and it leads up to the final Battle of Endor and the second Death Star it does a great job with the plot in the beginning showing a different perspective not just the Empire bad let's do this showing that people in your family might have differing opinions on who decide with showing the the day-to-day life of traitors who scan objects scan containers pick up containers drop them off basically a legal version of what Han Solo was doing that part I really enjoyed I enjoyed that they set up these dastardly Raiders these these pirates and that they're using different tactics against each other like planting spice and their container so that the Imperials will pick it up so in that sense with the the missions they're a little bit more inventive than the usual go here patrol kill everybody you don't actually see your first Imperial ship until four missions in in a very very difficult mission but when you finally first see that Star Destroyer enter the area and Tie Fighters enter and there's there's a big payoff with that because they delayed that for so long one of the big problems of the game however is it feels like it was a bit rushed even though it looks fine and there's actually a great exe installer it's on my system it's called xwa you see PV 1.3 dot exe I'll say that again xwa you see PV 1.3 dot exe and that gives you the new texture pack it makes it look a lot better runs it in widescreen fixes a lot of problems it might cause some other problems because I thought I'd recorded a few hours of gameplay and they're all gone but the game feels a little bit unfinished in a way because there are a few problems for example I lined up and did the automated docking procedure and it just pulled my ship right into a wall it exploded that was a bit of a problem I recommend turning on the invulnerable so that you don't have there are no checkpoints in this game and you can't save during the middle of a mission so if you're doing really well in a 25-minute mission and then you accidentally Ram into something or something rams into you that's not really the way you want to die so I recommend turning on and vulnerable you can still have the challenge of not getting shot out of the sky it's a very challenging game sometimes it's a little more challenging than it needs to be because of poor explanation there's one mission where one of the objectives was to destroy at least 25% of the ver axial force these are the Raiders that you're competing with that are a little bit dastardly and might have struck deals with the Empire spoiler alert but I was stuck at 23% I didn't know what else to destroy I kept failing the mission trying to figure it out also that mission has an 8 minute timer before the Imperials come in and cause all kinds of havoc and you need to flee I had to look up a walkthrough and it found I found out that there were these other containers that weren't labeled ver Axio that you needed to destroy it it weren't mentioned in the mission on the briefing map or anything so this is game I would recommend having a walkthrough handy luckily it's from 1999 there are lots of easily accessible walkthroughs it controls very tight it feels just like an x-wing TIE fighter game I think it runs off of the x-wing vs. TIE fighter engine which is probably an improved version of the TIE fighter engine if you've never played a TIE fighter Game one of the most important parts of it are that you're constantly juggling how much energy you're devoting to how fast your lasers are recharging how fast your shields are recharging and your engine speed you can put everything - lasers and shields so that they're constantly charging but you're gonna be going very very slow you're not gonna be able to catch up to faster and more maneuverable ships you turn radius is gonna be slower that kind of thing you can also if you have a fully charged thing of lasers you can just cannibalize it from that and directly dump that into your shields or you can flip-flop your shields - all the way to the front all the way to the back or you can have them evenly spread out so there's things like this that can really mean the difference between life and death because once your shields are gone it's only a few hits before you are dead an addition that x-wing the lines adds is that when you're flying a Karelian freighter which is a Millenium Falcon out there Notley Millennium Falcon but the same type of ship looks the same you have an auto turret so you can just like from the movies so you can set that thing to either be on defensive mode or to attack the target you're after and when you're clearing out you know a pack of six tie fighters flying at you that becomes an integral integral part of the story and really really slides in nicely with the energy management that is the basis of the other games and this game as well so that part I enjoyed I enjoyed the the different perspective the picking up the different items but it really comes down to your patience with it and sometimes unless you really really want to challenge you're probably gonna want to knock it down too easy maybe or I suggest giving each mission you know once or twice until you stop having fun one or two attempts until you stop having fun and then maybe it's throwing on invulnerable and getting through it so you can see the rest of it because as the story unfolds it is pretty interesting and you're gonna be hopping into you know different ships 795 Y wing a wing x wing and eventually the Millennium Falcon near the end so I would say if you can find it for cheap and you have a joystick it's worth getting into just know going in that there are gonna be some problems with it it definitely feels like it didn't get enough love as the watertight TIE fighter because I you know I have no problem with sometimes you failing a mission because of some NPCs because the the strength of these games and the ambition of these games is that they wanted to give you a very large playing field dozens of ships flying around capital ships on both sides mission-critical craft that you you are gonna be escorting that the the enemies are escorting you've got bombing runs going on there's so much happening that of course you going in there and being the monkey wrench can make this thing really work or you can you can screw things up or or who knows maybe an enemy ship just gets lucky that day and and they slip past you and and they just kind of cause a chain reaction of crap that it eventually means you've failed the mission maybe through no fault of your own definitely there's going to be times where it is from no fault of your own but that part I can forgive in order to receive the giant sandbox of the levels because you can you can approach these these missions many different ways where who you're gonna target first how you allocate your your wingman how fast you want to approach things do you want to hang back that sort of thing the problems that become more unforgiveable or when they you know they don't explain the level properly or sometimes there are going to be moments where you just could not have stopped the mission from failure but I think it's worth pushing through and getting past that stuff especially if you've played TIE fighter if you played the balance of power campaign from a vs. TIE fighter and you're just looking for more of that classic formula this is it the story is well done if you can forgive those bumps I think it's worth checking out for any Thai fighter fan if you haven't gone back you may be thinking of course everybody who likes Thai fighter has already played it but hey I love Thai fighter probably one of my top 3 games of all time maybe top 5 and I had just played it for the first time this week so thanks for checking it out through any other games you would like to see us cover let us know please in the comments below and bye for now

Channel: A 90s kid

Views: 12,981

Rating: 4.5512195 out of 5

Keywords: games, gaming, ps4, xbox, nintendo, pc, star wars, xwing, tie fighter, review

Id: Tw882pVTeos

Length: 9min 29sec (569 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 05 2018