The missions are well-designed with attention paid to where units are located and what their flight paths are. Mission 2 has several minutes where the player isn't really engaged in anything happening while the transports fly to the Hammer, missed opportunity there and throughout the battle to use in-mission messages to flesh out the story which didn't seem to be fleshed out as well as it could have been. No standout moments to make this one memorable.

Bar none the most fantastic briefings of anything from the Battle Center, which is just the very first indicator that attention has been paid to every facet of this masterpiece. Every mission has been meticulously crafted to push the player to their limit, offering a challenge at every difficulty level whether the in-game cheats are used or not. What’s also unique about this battle is that almost every mission pits the player alone against everything else going on, there aren’t any friendlies that will accomplish the mission goals for you. Mission 1 gives you the most assistance with a number of friendly fighters on the map, but the scenario still forces the player to make the right choices in order to succeed. Mission 5 stands out as an intensely personal challenge to the player; either you’ve mastered energy management and maneuvering or you won’t make it. The final mission does a great job of putting everything together between the dogfighting, situational awareness, and problem-solving skills that the other missions tested. But I think the thing I enjoy the most about the battle is the entertaining premise and the way it’s fleshed out in the briefings, the pre-flight questions, the missions themselves, the post-flight questions, and even the Readme file. The battle isn’t just memorable for how difficult it is, it’s also a master class in storytelling and design and deserves nothing less than the highest rating.

Note: I made one or two passes on each mission, all on Medium.

Story: There's a cohesive story going on from mission to mission, which gives the battle a good base. But when this battle was accompanied by a 10 page fiction, the generic briefings and radio messages were noticeable. The messages that are there are bascially just responding to what's happening in the mission, so there's nothing being added to the story or anything that helps break up some of the downtime like during the docking time during the first mission. For example, the fiction explains why Sigma goes from T/As and GUNs to T/As and Scimitar Bombers, but the battle makes no mention of it. The battle had a great piece of fiction to incorporate elements of, but the battle went its own way and missed a lot of opportunities that would've made it memorable. (2/5)

Design: To balance the large number of EH ships in each mission, there were a lot of NR ships and real danger presented to the player in each mission. Part of me appreciated the references to other franchises, like DREAD Klendathu in mission two and CRS Whitewalker in missions three and four. On the other hand, these names aren't relevant to the story and ultimately felt out of place. Mission four has a goal for disabling E/S Harasser, but the player isn't in a ship with ion cannons and the fighters that do have ion cannons wouldn't target E/S Harasser. Mission four has another issue with stakes; CRS Whitewalker should be attempting to flee, but there's no point where it actually moves to do that. It's the details the hold this battle back from being truly great. (3/5)

Overall Score: 2.5 out of 5, rounded up to 3 because I enjoyed flying the battle and that's not something that normally happens for me in XvT. Nice job!

There are a frustrating number of situations that have to be 'just so' in order to get a ship to do what it needs to do in order to complete the related goal, like the INT issue in mission 5 that MAJ Cruise mentioned. 1 out of 5 for design, giving one point back for the story which feels like it had some thought put into it.

Excellent, well-made battle. Though, if you're rusty like I was when I flew this one, you may want to start with something else, because this battle will be throwing things at you every step of the way.

Blow up ships with Star Trek names, but it's just not the same unless they LOOK like Star Trek ships.