Reviewed: 2023-12-01
I rate this one so low because of mission 4, my absolute least favorite kind of mission: completely random whether or not it's possible to win. The timing of ships arrival depends on what the npc craft are doing. Sometimes (repeatedly for me) your friendlies accidentally destroy the mission critical craft theyre supposed to disable, or damage it too much that it dies instantly anyway once enemies come in. Sometimes they disable it too quickly which triggers the enemies to come in to attack it before you can get the other craft off you (a group of six interceptors all firing missiles at you so you cant really ignore them). The time I finally won, i intercepted a couple of my friendlies' own torpedos so they wouldn't damage the mission critical craft too quickly (it's stupid to ever need to do this to win and clearly it wasn't intended), and we ended up being able to destroy the factory where the wave that kept killing the mission critical craft spawned from before they could even launch.
Maybe if you fly it in exactly the correct path they had in mind it works out more consistently? But it's not clear. All the mission objectives say for my flight group are that i'm supposed to kill a factory, but if you head straight there, it'll mess up and you'll lose. If you try to clear mines around the factory first, you lose. If you try to kill the fighters that are all targeting you, you lose. If you help disable the freighters you lose. If you try to protect the freighters and nothing else, you lose. Really horrible design because of the interaction between the NPC craft.
The other missions in the battle were okay but this one was incredibly irritating.