the ultimate laser against cap ship grind. no story, no sense, no fun, buggy mission briefing, wingmen commit harakiri and leave you alone to do the rest.
Not quite as bad as its predecessor... but almost as bad. especially the last mission. if you stick around for a second too long your own pals will destroy the mission goals even after you have succeeded.
The base and sheer number of ships they have build there as quite impressive and fun to fly through. With XWAU the missile boat bugs of vanilla XWA don't exist anymore so it's actually quite fun. Even though the first four missions could easily just have been one long mission that requires you to fly back the hanger and rearm your ordenance. Instead they split it into four and thus have to make many enemy cap ships invincible - which is always nonsense. Also in the last mission you can easily go out and have a meal. Nothing happens while the fighters to be transferred fly in doub circles trying to find the hangar.
This one gets you flying varying transport craft. Flying a YT-2000 on with the auto fire turrets in the last two missions is easy. But flying sluggish transport craft against ace and top ace fighters is very, very hard and more grind than fun. Nice idea, dingy implementation.
First mission contains enemy B-Wings which are set to invincible. Because they need to disable some of your craft for the mission to proceed according to the story line. Mission help says “it should work”. To be sure you have to disable your own craft. A good example of bad mission design. It continues on like that.
A quick little battle with lots of bombing runs - lots of it. I really mean it. Lots. And I have to fill twenty words even though there is not more to say.
It‘s ok. Grinding down three stations and two cap ships with lasees by yourself over 35 min is something you can do. But it is just not all that much fun.
Nine out of eight are almost exactly the same. Wait, I think number eight and nine are exactly the same. You can probably play those without firing a single shot and just watch it happen. One mission lets / makes you fly an Interdictor: *please make it stop*
I feel bad giving this only two stars because In like big battles and I appreciate the effort. But it seems like they didn’t go all the way to balance it properly. Essentially you often fly a fighter in what should be a bombing mission. That makes it quite grindy.