A simple mission, clear some fighters and strike the objective target. Craft counts are reasonable, and it doesn't take very long to complete. The dogfight could pose a challenge with default armaments, but you're given a wide selection of optional warheads and beams which can entirely mitigate the threat. This can become a very fast, easy mission if you play it right. The combat is okay for what it is. It leans more into backstory than gameplay, though it still doesn't provide much information. All you really get is a few paragraphs about the squadron and its role, presented in the readme and mission description. The briefing was a chore, it spends most of its time listing the squadrons and their mottos than actually explaining the mission task at hand. Overall it's good for being a fast mission, free of bugs or annoyances.

This could be a candidate for one of the easiest missions that actually requires you to do something. Unlike some other missions, you can't just time accelerate and fly off into deep space. The primary goal is ridiculously simple, basic inspection duty, and can be completed within a few minutes, even at a leisurely pace. Everything about this mission has been designed to make it as easy as possible. You're given an unusually large number of wingmen, who aren't really necessary. There are some waves of fighters, but their skill level is so low that they're unlikely to pose a threat, even to a rookie pilot. I didn't see much plot, and the briefing is pretty bare. There's exactly one primary, secondary, and bonus goal. It's bug free, which is a plus. I can't call this good, but it's not bad either. My main criticism is really its complete lack of difficulty, which makes it seem rather pointless. Quick to fly if that's your thing, but there's nothing interesting here.

Not much to say about this one. It's a very small, simple mission, and it's quite easy, even on hard. The title and briefing description suggests there's more to this mission, claiming it will be difficult to get a good score, perhaps an extra challenge at some point, but that's not really the case. Getting a good score is easier than most missions. In fact, it's probably a little too easy. There is some annoyance if you play it a certain way, which can make it difficult to grab all the points. But it's relatively quick to finish and repeat if necessary. There isn't much to destroy, only a convoy and some waves of fighters. The convoy itself is mostly harmless. Because of its simplicity it's pretty much bug free, though the convoy pathing could've been better. Besides the misleading title, it's a relaxing easy mission, a nice break from others in the Battle Center. But it's also kind of forgettable. When I revisited this for a competition, I kept thinking it was something else, something larger scale.

There's no good way to say it. It's terrible. Completely terrible. There's no plot, not that it matters in free missions anyway. You're supposed to protect a convoy, though it never gets attacked, and leaves immediately after arriving. Your goal is literally just destroy all rebel craft. To make things worse, a massive pirate group arrives, supposedly to attack the convoy. Mostly they just attack you, and they don't count for mission completion. And of course, there's tons of them. The difficulty is all over the place. I found easy to be harder than normal, thanks to a collision bug, and hard is nearly impossible unless you have unlimited patience. Depending on how it plays out, even flying on easy might still be too difficult for the average pilot. The entire mission is a series of dogfights while severely outnumbered. There's a friendly wave of fighters helping you out, but enemy craft almost exclusively target you. Meanwhile they just keep coming. Getting a good score is a time-consuming, soul-destroying grind. Besides the aforementioned patience, you'll have to kill nearly 85 craft. Typically at any given time you'll be outnumbered 8 to 1. If you're familiar with XvT's difficulty curve, you probably know how that plays out. Fight, escape, recharge shields, rinse and repeat. But wait, there's more! You only have one life. Not even a beam weapon to help. Only advanced missiles, so use them carefully. The mission isn't even bug free, with overlapping waypoints. A convoy transport might collide with the ISD, which prevents the pirate force from arriving. If you're playing on hard, you absolutely need to clear the pirates to trigger one last rebel ship in order to complete the mission. (Hint: order the ISD to wait when it arrives.) Bad design, bad gameplay, and not fun at all. The whole thing is a mess. Would not recommend to anyone.

A simple mission that doesn't have much to offer. The primary objective is quite easy, only one primary target, and you have plenty of waves and ordnance to destroy it. Some enemy fighters are trying to stop you, but you're more than equipped to handle it. The main challenge here is scoring, which is a pain. Once the primary objective is complete, there's another whole phase to the battle which exists for no real reason than to rack up bonus points, with many more waves of fighters to contend with. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but the craft counts are excessive. In total over the entire mission, there's about 100 ships to destroy. There's so many fighters present in the bonus section that it's impossible to take them all on in a straight fight, except perhaps on a low difficulty. The dogfights aren't enjoyable, requiring standoff hit-and-run tactics as you slowly deplete their numbers. I fly countless missions attempting score attacks, and I can say this mission takes way longer than it should. The end result is an exhausting, repetitive mission that isn't fun at all.

Some good fun combat here, but it's a flawed mission that could've used a lot more polish. It's successful at creating a large scale battle without throwing too many ships into the scene at once. Unfortunately the attacks are kind of disjointed and senseless, and ultimately don't amount to anything. Capital ships are parked in space, not really doing much until destroyed or triggered to flee. Meanwhile enemy defensive corvettes will attack pretty much anything in sight, including their own ships. Collisions and starship clipping are also somewhat common to see, especially if you replay it multiple times to full completion. Scoring can be a real challenge, mostly because of the chaotic and somewhat unpredictable nature of the battle. It usually never plays the same way twice. On the plus side, it's not very difficult to finish, as enemy fighters are the bulk of your targets. Opting for heavier warheads can make the capital ships easier. The flaws can be annoying if you're trying for a good score, but otherwise don't impact combat much, they're mostly just unsightly. Overall there's a nice concept here, it's more interesting than typical 'defend the base' missions.

A humorous premise, which made me laugh. Also a sign of just how old the TC is, the battles, and us pilots too. The mission only has a single objective, and is quite easy. There's not much to say about the combat. There's a lot of craft to fight, but they're not much of a threat. If you want an easy mission with lots of targets, this is it. Scoring is a bit on the lengthy side, but tolerable. There's a lot of optional craft to fight, particularly in the second phase of the mission. Actually there's a bit too many, as the craft limit will be reached if you don't clear away the fighters in the first phase, and it will prevent some of the second phase from arriving. There really isn't any need to stuff so many craft into play at once, considering most of them won't do anything. Aside from the craft limit issue, everything is functional. Not bad, but not really good either. To fly the mission as efficiently as possible, I'd recommend helping to keep your wingmen alive until the objective has been achieved.

A simple mission that's reasonably well made, and has some depth and challenge to it. If you only care about fast completion, the primary objectives are easy and quick if you know what to do. The real challenge is scoring. The gimmick here is that you need to keep your most dangerous foe, your worst enemy alive while you rack up points. Easier said than done, and the degree of care and caution required to perform this feat can be very demanding of your skill, multitasking, and especially patience. Naturally there are some luck-based elements as well, which can make one's pursuit of perfection quite infuriating. Gimmicks aside, time is the most obvious annoyance, and my biggest complaint. Although it's typical for bonuses to require more investment, this mission can be excessively time-consuming. The opening sequence, while clever, also requires time acceleration to make it bearable, especially on repeated attempts. Otherwise it's a good mission with tense dogfights that fits the role of the TIE Advanced. Incredibly powerful, but not invulnerable.

A very easy, quick battle. Which is probably the only good thing to say about it. Well it's mostly bug free, so I guess it has that too. There's no plot, no real briefings, and every mission is basically the same thing, just with some alterations. Protect your capital ship, destroy enemy capital ship. Rinse and repeat. The novelty here is that you're flying an X-wing and B-wing for three missions. One mission has you flying a T/D, and the last has you flying a gunboat. Of course, none of the craft choices are explained. The gunboat is a welcome and refreshing change after the janky flight experience of the Fly Rebels patch, especially on TIE95. TIECD seems to fare better, though. Besides the repetitive nature of the missions, they're not very well designed. No secondary goals to be found, and not much for bonuses. Some of the officer questions are present and unaltered from the original campaign. Lazy design. Scoring is fine for the most part, racking up kills gives some semblance of challenge and a chance to dogfight, if you choose to do so. The low point of scoring is mission 4, which involves three light cruisers as optional targets and will take a while to finish. Parked in space, of course, like all other capital ships in this battle. Did I mention it was lazy? If you just want to complete the battle, choose rockets and hit your primary targets, it's that simple.

A mixed battle. The primary objectives are usually pretty easy, but there's some challenge to be found in the bonuses. Getting a good score can take some planning, and will require an investment of time. Unfortunately some of the scoring can be tedious and boring, as a few missions feature capital ships which serve no gameplay purpose besides wasting time for points. Some missions are reasonably well made, if a bit strangely designed. Others are nonsensical or contain careless bugs. I found the plot to be nonsensical too, the briefings are thin and don't offer anything of interest. The battle drags on, and probably would've been better if it were condensed and had a mission (or two) removed. The later half of the battle is more about bombing than dogfighting, including the final mission which featured a significant difficulty spike from an unusual situation. Overall with some refinement it could've been better. Maybe it would be more fun playing normally instead of gunning for points.

A mixed battle. It copies existing missions from the original campaign and modifies them. The first mission is a shameless copy of B1M1. The fourth and fifth missions appear to be copies of B8M4 and B8M5, but are much more heavily modified. The second and third missions are generic enough that they could come from almost anything, but my guess is B1M2 and B1M3. A minor nitpick: in theory copying missions should provide an example of how to use page stops in the briefing, but that's not the case here. Aside from B1M1, the actual content is mostly just a series of dogfights with the occasional bombing run. Each mission is stuffed full of craft on both sides, attempting to create giant battles that are sometimes too big, or too prolonged. Luckily it appears to be bug-free, though I suspect there may be a bug with the craft limit in the final mission. The primary objectives are easy, but scoring is tedious. This would be easy to spam through except for #4. The combat is over quickly, but you'll need to use time acceleration for the next half of the mission, waiting for craft to finish docking. It takes about 35 minutes on the clock.

Mostly easy, but terrible design. The first mission is decent enough, then the battle rapidly devolves into a complete mess of bad design. Most of the usual tropes of a low quality battle are present here. Capital ships and stations that hold steady doing absolutely nothing, capital ships with starfighter orders, and fighters with broken orders that don't do anything. It gets obscenely bad in the final half, when ships begin crashing into other ships due to bad waypoints and pathing. In the fourth mission, there's several waves of fighters you're supposed to escort home, only for them to crash into their mothership ISD trying to navigate around where the hangar is. While the primary goal is generous enough to allow a few deaths, there's a bonus goal based on 100% survival. Mission six, the grand finale, is the perfect storm of nearly all of the above problems wrapped into a single chaotic mess. It would take an entire page just to describe everything wrong with it, and is genuinely difficult for all the wrong reasons. While there's a bit of fun to be found, I can't overlook the frustrating aspects present here, and I wouldn't recommend this battle to anyone.

A simple, quick, mostly easy battle that doesn't have anything else going for it. The in-game plot is almost nonexistent, but an included text file expands on it slightly. The battle itself is underwhelming, and poorly designed. Normally I'm not one to criticize objectives, since there's only so much you can do within the game engine, but defending ISD Avenger from random attacks is a theme I'm growing increasingly weary of. Especially when its orders are to hold steady, so it won't even return fire. Not that it really matters, because nearly the entire enemy attack force will crash into it anyway. Another annoying aspect is that sometimes required targets will hyper out, so you must remain vigilant. Luckily the missions are quick. The final mission is boring, a lone cruiser and three X-wings are your only opposition. Getting a good score in this battle is actually quite difficult, mainly from the first mission and the aforementioned defense mission, as you'll lose out on a significant number of potential kills in a very short time span.

An easy, average battle that has you flying a missile boat for its duration. For the most part, everything is adequately designed with little to complain about. You'll have plenty of ordnance to handle everything that gets thrown at you. The first mission can be tricky on hard when gunning for points, having you face several waves of craft who launch advanced missiles at you. This does provide at least some challenge for your overpowered craft, but it's manageable. If you intend to destroy everything, this is the only mission where you might run out of warheads, and using lasers on a missile boat can get tedious. The second mission has some suspense as you have a limited amount of time to hunt down fleeing craft, but this can be easily mitigated with the correct warhead choice. The third mission is laughably easy, far too simple and underwhelming. Personally it stands out as the weakest point of an otherwise decent battle. The final mission was pretty fun despite being mostly a turkey shoot. Overall the primary objectives are quick to accomplish. If you like blowing things up with a missile boat, it's enjoyable without being overwhelming.

Virtually no plot. A text file is included with the battle, but it only contains a few sentences of relevant information. I can't imagine why it wasn't included with the briefing, because the briefing and officer questions are almost completely empty. The battle feels more like a collection of free missions. The first mission is probably the most well crafted of the bunch, though that isn't saying much. It's also the most difficult and can be tricky to complete, as you must protect shuttles from a lengthy boarding operation while a handful of Rebel fighters hyper directly into laser range. The shuttles are not marked as mission critical, but you indirectly fail if they're destroyed. Warhead interception is also needed against a lone B-wing. The second mission involves flying a T/F to destroy a single T/D in a dogfight, and that's the only objective. The third mission is an escort mission. Easy but very long, it requires about 25 minutes on the clock, nearly half of which is spent waiting. You can opt to fight a cruiser in the meantime. The final mission is another easy escort mission. Overall it's a simple, boring, medium-length battle with nothing of interest. No secondary or bonus goals at all. The only plus is that it's bug-free, so everything works as expected.

Two things immediately come to mind when downloading. Only one mission in a battle? And horrible reviews. I doesn't take long to figure out why. No plot or premise, just you alone against a series of craft. It's innocuous at first, merely a series of increasingly difficult fighters. So what's the catch? It becomes suspicious when the shuttles arrive, then the escort shuttles. Turreted craft against your fragile T/I? Clearly this mission is up to no good. Confirmed with ATRs, corvettes, and a modified frigate. While there is actually a strategy to complete the mission, the amount of time and effort isn't worth it. There's no plot, no humor, no fun, no effort from the author, nothing clever or interesting about it. It exists solely to waste your time, and there's nothing to show for it. Spamming through it with invincibility, unlimited ammo for warheads, and time acceleration is the way to go.

No plot. The briefing and officer dialog lean toward the empty side. The battle title is self explanatory, but that's all you're given. Traitors are attacking, so destroy their fighters and their fleet of capital ships over the course of the battle. That's it. Capital ships don't pose much of a threat, provided you're attacking the correct mission objective. They're parked in space and rarely do anything except return fire. The craft and loadouts are inconsistent, partially explained by a shortage of fighters, the only thing the plot bothers to mention. You'll face waves of T/As and T/Ds, which make for an interesting challenge (or agonizing experience) in a slow gunboat, which you have to fly in two missions. The second time you'll have a tractor beam, though it would've been nice to have at first. The missions and their objectives are very simple, and if you're gunning straight for completion they usually don't take long. Scoring can be difficult as you don't have much control over the dogfights or friendly craft, competing with their advanced missiles for kills. Enemy fighters, especially T/Ds will very commonly crash into starships, robbing you of points. There's also nothing differentiating the traitors, leading to a confusing situation of Alpha attacking Alpha. Overall poor mission design. There's some novelty in the dogfights if you enjoy nimble opponents (like I do), otherwise there's nothing of value here.

An average battle that does enough right to be on the better side of average, but is otherwise unremarkable. There's a plot driving the missions, and the briefing and officer dialog is well presented, despite getting a bit sparse as the battle progresses. Missions are reasonably varied, the usual assortment of defend, escort, and assault. With the exception of the first mission, they aren't stuffed full of craft merely to have something to fight. Most of the time you'll be flying a T/A. Difficulty is relaxed, but there's a few moments where you'll need to be alert. Bonus objectives provide an extra challenge in certain missions, as they're easy to miss and not immediately obvious. A good score may be tricky, as some capital ships are prone to fleeing quickly, and taking their starfighters with them.

Where to start with this ridiculously difficult, frustrating battle? It's full of gimmicks and gotchas that are absolutely designed to frustrate you. It requires memorization of what to expect, sheer repetition and perseverance until you succeed. It's clearly intended to test the limits of not just your skill, but also your patience. Especially on hard difficulty. There's even an aptly named 'Fu' squadron. Lots of time will be wasted trying and learning from your mistakes. Whether insta-failing the mission or simply killing you, your fate is already decided if you stray from the correct path. The first mission is a fairly straightforward capture operation while flying the mighty T/A, but its gotcha comes at the very end with the transports. It's not super difficult, but it's not a pleasant experience to instantly fail after sinking so much time and effort into a single attempt. The second mission is where the real gimmicks begin, and completing them requires deeper knowledge of the game mechanics and how to exploit them. The puzzles take some thinking, and the difficulty comes from both solving them, and executing them well. Unfortunately there's a lot of luck involved too. A stray laser, damaged flight controls, or extra salvo of rockets can end a mission rather quickly, through no real fault of your own. Mission 5 was personally the most difficult, and marks the first time I've ever enabled cheats just to see how the mission is supposed to unfold before attempting it for real. It demands perfect execution, and that's not an understatement. While I suppose I could've beaten it on hard after enough attempts, ultimately I ended up dropping the difficulty to easy, which I'm sure will give Tempest great pleasure to read. The final mission isn't too bad, luckily it's the one mission with a couple gimmicks that actually make it somewhat easy, even on hard. Tempest can't be fooled here, as my own clever attempts to outsmart the design often proved futile. I was even called a chicken for my efforts. Overall the puzzles are moderately satisfying, especially mission 3 which featured very clever use of warheads. But the satisfaction of completing the puzzles and finishing the battle aren't enough to outweigh the overall frustration. Getting salty only makes things worse, and the humor in the briefings wore thin as the competition ended. If rating on fun-factor alone, I would probably give it a 2. Difficulty for the sake of difficulty, gimmicks and luck-based perfection aren't my cup of tea. But it wouldn't be fair to call this a bad battle, or merely average. Everything about its design is fully intentional. It's rather well designed and clever, even the briefings and its ASCII art of the TIEs. I give it a 3.5, grudgingly rounding up to 4.

Interesting battle. The briefings are well made, the plot and missions are generally good, with some challenge to them if you want the bonuses. Some of the missions had a few too many fighters, but it was tolerable. The final mission was the weakest, too many starships swarming around in close proximity, including a collision, and also some fighters leaving their hangars and immediately crashing into another ship. It seems that a chaotic mess was intended, but it could've used some tweaks. It's nice to experience new fighters, but I'm not sure if they helped the battle, especially in the last mission. The Phalanx Gunboat is basically just a faster T/D with worse cannon placement, and the TIE Dragon is a gimmicky T/B that dumbfires infinite torpedoes instead of lasers. Difficult to dogfight with, and care must be taken to work around the projectile limit. If you miss, it takes some time for the warhead to expire. But since nearly half the battle points are in the last mission, and there's a lot to dogfight, scoring may be difficult if you can't master the skill of dumbfiring against quicker starfighters.

I saw the low review score and wondered what was wrong with it. This is quite a unique, remarkable battle, for all the wrong reasons. It's extremely low quality. Very simple, few flightgroups, few objectives, briefings and plot are almost nonexistent. I don't recall the battle title having any relevance to the plot, either. What truly stands out about this battle is that it somehow manages to have the most bugs and issues of any battle up to this point. It's so broken, there were bugs in this game I didn't even know existed. With all that aside, gameplay is nothing special. It's pretty easy, except for perhaps the third mission, which is a very poorly designed capture mission. It may also take some time to finish, attacking starships, waiting for a captures, and dogfighting several waves of all kinds of TIEs, particularly in the last two missions. While I found the dogfights to be sort of interesting, I can't really give this battle any points for the sheer amount of problems with it.

It's spammy, lots of craft to kill. Kind of fun, but also poorly designed. Overall there are many issues with orders and waypoints, and goal designations prompting officer voice lines after every fighter kill. The first three missions are manageable on hard difficulty due to craft having low baseline AI levels. It's all well and good until the last mission. Way too many starships to destroy, not enough ordnance, and a weak craft choice (gunboat) that makes the fighter screen too difficult to deal with. The decoy beam is technically viable here, with enough time and patience that is.
But this mission doesn't seem to play out as intended, even on medium difficulty. Probably designed for easy instead.

A strange battle that is difficult to judge. The missions are usually simple, with minimalist design. It can't decide whether it wants to be challenging or easy. If score is not a concern, it shouldn't be a problem. But on hard, the first and third mission are quite tricky. Scoring will require skillful flying, as the third mission is especially difficult in some annoying ways. The second and last mission are very easy, with odd AI behaviors that are easy to beat, if somewhat time-consuming.

Gameplay is simple and easy. Getting a decent score is also easy, and generally quick to complete, too. The combat isn't great, merely okay, and sometimes repetitive. A bit lackluster and sometimes spammy with the enemy craft waves, but it's tolerable. It has a plot, but it's about as bare as it gets. Pretty much nothing in the briefings. While I don't expect much from story in these battles, it has a couple moments that are kind of stupid. Overall it doesn't really have much going for it. It's not particularly interesting, but at least it's not annoying either.

This is one of, if not the worst battle I've ever flown for scoring purposes. I gave up halfway through mission 3 and played the rest on easy to maintain my sanity. Saying there's too many fighters is an understatement, especially if you're playing on hard. By my count, the missions contain a grand total of nearly 650 enemy fighters. Many of them with advanced missiles. In most cases you won't have to fight them all, as the motherships can be destroyed long before they finish spewing out their seemingly infinite waves. The craft you fly are generally underwhelming and not properly equipped for the battle. To make things worse, there's no plot whatsoever, there are too many missions, and there's even a few bugs. The missions are essentially the same. Fight through legions of enemy craft while performing some primary objective. Save a starship, or destroy/capture enemy starship. The briefings and questions are underwhelming. Even one of the debriefs is incredibly lazy. The officer says 'The enemy has been destroyed' and the secret officer says 'nothing to add.' Great, that really advances the plot and makes me feel better about the time I wasted. My advice: fly it on easy (it's much more tolerable) and get through it as quickly as you can, or don't fly it at all.