Customer Reviews

Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance (Jewel Case)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

This game is one of LucasArt's best. It is possibly the last in the X-Wing series, because of the new SW movies, but it is great. First off, there is a good plot. I was a little dissapointed with the other games in that you seemed so much like a mindless drone. In this game, you start off as the youngest in a family shipping company. You are "Ace" Azzameen. You start off with basic missions for your family's business, with a few feuds with your rival company, Imperial partnered Viraxo. A few of these might be a little dull, but there are only a few, and the last couple before you join the alliance are definantly the opposite of boring. Next in the plot, you end up joining the rebellion (explainied in game), and eventually get to participate in the destruction of the second Death Star. The game has alot better graphics than the other games, and the sound is superb. The only complaint I have is that they used different actor voices in the Battle of Endor to be those of characters like Lando and Ackbar. They should have just taken the voices from the movies. The music is also great. The music will change as different events take place. For instance, when a Star Destroyer hypers in, you will likely hear the Imperial March. Some of the missions are tough, but you have the option to skip up to 3 missions. Now, I actually got this game when it first released in 1999 for [price]. I thought it was definantly worth it. And now look at it here, for [price]! You have nothing to lose! Buy it!

Really.This is one of the best games I have ever played,but there are few who have played it.

Anyway,here's my review.

The game starts off in between The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi.You are Ace Azzameen.You are the son of a succesful family who runs a trading buisiness (that is being hassled by the vicious Viraxo). Later,your father is killed,and you become a pilot for the Republic (like pretty much every other Star Wars game). I'm not going to spoil the plot any more.

The game plays like most other combat flight simulators.You assume a first-person view inside the cockpit of a ship,and you fly around and shoot stuff.Sometimes you have missions where you have to deliver certain cargo,ect.

The graphics in this game are excellent (assuming that you have a good video card).If you have a outdated video card,the graphics can get kind of ugly.
The sound and voice acting in this game is excellent,too.LucasArts really picked the perfect actors for their roles.The sound is crisp and clear,but the music is just the same generic Star Wars music we've all heard about a million times by now.

PROS:
Great graphics
Good sound (and voice acting)
Nice controls
It's Star Wars!
Very cinematic

CONS:
You should have a good video card
Need joystick

? Why is it so underrated ?

I have played most star wars games that have been made in the last ten years. Still, this game amazes me. No single flight simulator has gotten close to this game, even though it was made ten years ago. Yeah, I know, the graphics leave you wanting more, but if you can get past them, you'll realize how great this game is. there is just so much strategy in the flight system. Its also true, you will have to know and memorize about 50 separate key commands to get the most out of the game, but really is that so much? This game is worth it. Really deep story arcs. Realistically crafted missions. Great gameplay. Don't write this game off just because it is old. I went through the campaign this past summer, and enjoyed it as much or more than when I first played it.

The best part of the game(of course) is the Millinium Falcon. The only game in the X-wing trilogy to allow flying Millinium Falcon/ corrilian missions. My whole reason for my liking Star Wars in the first place was the Falcon an awsome ship with turrets, corridors, and starship environment stuffed into a fighter thats manuverable plus hyperspace capability. And, of course, Han Solo and Chewie at the helm. In this game you can fly the Falcon(as Ace Asameen) but also an assortment of other ships including a redesigned version of the corrilian transport(that's more semetrical) and the classic X-wings, Y-wings and Tie-fighters(in simulatoions). If you like flying space ships this is the game to get and probably the ONLY game that supports nearly all of the SW ships complete with cocpits and interior detail. Like other Lucas arts simulations most missions deal with "the transport MUST survive" "You MUST fight off 20 Asault gunboats" or "You MUST meet with such and such at a given time frame" but it is a challenge even on medium difficulty. A dual stick game controller is the only way I have been able to survive any mission. Joysticks blow, long live dual controllers! Force Feedback IS supported, despite the age of this game. WOW!

This was one of my favorites after college. If you are a fan of the X-Wing series, this is the ultimate version. Prior to this game I used to think "Why can't I fly scenario X?" With this game you have the ability to create whatever flight scenario you wish: capital ships, small scale, etc. The only thing I haven't been able to do is create a "death star attack" scenario; although I admit I'm not sure if that is possible in this game. Overall, though, this game will provide hours of entertainment.

The single player story line is OK, although some of the missions are extremely frustrating (especially those that require a LONG time to get to the end, where the hardest part of the mission causes you to fail over and over.)