Video Games : Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance

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from: LucasArts Entertainment

: Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance
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Price: $39.53
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Amazon Maximum Age: 20 years
Amazon Minimum Age: 60 months
Binding: CD-ROM
Brand: Lucas Arts
ESRB Age Rating: Everyone
Format: CD-ROM
Label: LucasArts Entertainment
Manufacturer: LucasArts Entertainment
Model: 20918
Publisher: LucasArts Entertainment
Sales Rank: 17745
Studio: LucasArts Entertainment



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Editorial Review:

Amazon.com Review:
Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance casts you as the youngest son of the Azzameen family, a merchant dynasty operating in a galaxy far, far away. The game is set in the turbulent time period between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Caught amid increasing tensions between the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance, with business rivals watching for any sign of weakness, the Azzameens are on the edge of financial ruin. Worse, their Rebel sympathies may endanger their very survival.

As the family's newest pilot, you fly tutorial missions at first, under the supervision of your sister Aeron and the droid Emkay. But even as you are training, the situation heats up. Before long, the family has been betrayed, your space station has been seized, and you're forced to turn to the Rebellion. Though the game's focus is on combat, the development of this story is tight and suspenseful.

The story and the merchant/smuggler setting give the game plenty of variety. One mission may have you piloting a loaded freighter through an Imperial blockade, while another may place you in the cockpit of an X-Wing on a hit-and-run raid against an enemy battle station. Every ship, every weapon, every sound effect is pure Star Wars, totally faithful to the look--and feel--of the movies. This extends to the missions themselves: nothing works as planned, but somehow you and your Rebel allies manage to make it all the way to the climactic Battle of Endor. If you've distinguished yourself in the earlier missions, hot pilots will get the chance to take the controls of the Millennium Falcon and cram a torpedo into the gut of the Emperor's second Death Star.

Controlling the fighters, freighters, and transports in X-Wing Alliance is easy, with all the options you'd expect in a Star Wars simulation. Shield, engine, and weapon power levels are all adjustable, so you, too, can transfer all power to front deflector screens while attacking, or shut down power to weapons to outrun a swarm of TIE fighters. Novice players may find it difficult to control wingmen or to keep track of the changing objectives when missions go sour. But practice makes perfect, and the truly frustrated can simply skip up to three missions without penalty.

With a modest learning curve and graphics that put you right in the milieu of the Star Wars films, X-Wing Alliance will have you flying combat missions for the Rebel Alliance in no time--and loving every minute of it. --Alyx Dellamonica

Pros: Con:

Amazon.com Product Description:
A neutral family is swept up in the struggle against the encroaching Empire. You must defy the strong-arm tactics of a rival family who will stop at nothing to destroy your trading company. Ultimately, you will join the Rebel Alliance for a series of covert assignments and uncover information about the Empire's second Death Star project. The finale? You'll find yourself at the controls of the legendary Millennium Falcon, flying against the massive Imperial fleet in the Battle of Endor.



Customer Reviews
Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Best Star Wars Flight Sim EVER!!!
Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance This Game....IS BEAUTIFUL even for Today's Time...I have just gotten the Game a Month Ago or so AND IM STILL ON IT o.o Its AWESOME very very REALISTIC Dogfights and BEAUTIFUL EXPLOSIONS..Im a pretty good Pilot Myself and this is challangeing for ANYONE...and you're wingmen AI are SO SMART that they even steal you're kills if you're not fast enough :D Its exactly like being in a Cockpit of a X-WING and you get a sense that you need to Protect you're fellow Pilots and BELIVE ME THEY WILL PROTECT You...It hits the Star Wars Feel RIGHT ON THE HEAD :) and it just doesent get old...You can earn Metals , Ranks , Pilot Certifications and Items for you're Transport that you own in the game... TRUST ME IT IS WELL WORTH THE MONEY AND IF YOU ARE A SELF RESPECTING STAR WARS FAN YOU WOULD BUY THIS....and the Tie Fighters...SMART AS HECK...


Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - dated, still fun SW fighter sim
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.

Unlike the older X-wing games, you don't start out as a fighter pilot or even with alliance (or Imperials for "Tie Fighter" owners). Instead, you belomg to a family-run intergalactic shipping business, plying 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, interstellar freight forwarding involves a lot of space combat - you're 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 side, forcing you to the rebellion, and trade your Corellian freighter for an X-wing fighter. Until then, the game offers a series of missions that evolve from tutorial to modest test to more intense combat. You'll likely already have the skills needed if you've played the older SW Fighter's games, but these also set up the back story. (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. (That is until you've replayed the mission a few times, and it all starts to get old.)

"Alliance" is a mixed bag of hits and misses. 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 and not infrequently counter-intuitive goals (i.e., no matter how many Tie Fighters you swat down, ALL Lambda Shuttles MUST dock with the medical frigate; ALL Correlian cruisers must survive; you MUST inspect EVERY container; etc...). Counterintuitive mission goals guarantee that you'll fly even moderately challenging missions more than once.

Graphics and sound are up-to-date - the date unfortunately being 1999. 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 too 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 (though on my XP machine, the soundtrack tended to get hung if the mission lasted too long). 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. Also, failure to achieve goals in one of the mission areas means that you'll have to re-fly the entire mission set again.

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. Even when you join the alliance, you'll still be asked to handle some family business. 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. Other notable improvements - besides fighters, you can also fly armed freighters in the class of the Millenium Falcon or another class of ship that looks like a souped up version of the MF. To add to the complexity, you can turn over the actual flying and man your gun turrets, or set turrets to defensive fire - while that reduces the laser fire you can devote on targets you attack while flying, it's another example of how the game challenges you by forcing you to allocate your limited in-flight resources. Other new wrinkles - as a freighter you can pick up cargo, which makes for interesting missions retrieving contraband from a combat zone. (In an early mission, you've got to snatch a container of warheads from a space station under attack by a Star Destroyer - the way the mission is structured, you can't retrieve until near the end of the mission, when the station is about to explode.)

Most PC's should run this game without problems. I played it on my P4, having few WinXP compatibility problems (sound among them). The game also supports rudder pedals - for rolling maneuvers such as those used by scores of Tie Fighters. In short, an X-Wing battle-sim that's guaranteed to please, though obviously pleasing most those who've never tried one before.


Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance - One of the Finest in its Days!
I just got X Wing Alliance a few days ago, and it's pretty old now LOL - it was made in 1999. It's 2006 now, almost 7 years later! Guess what? It's still UNBELIEVABLY fun!!! I dare say that the experience itself surpasses even some of the modern flight sims we see today. The story is excellent - You are a member of the Azzameen family; trading company, slightly sympathetic to the Rebellion, but circumstances force you to join the Alliance and the game lasts 53 missions, the final of which is the Battle of Endor. Side stories are cool! They can help fill the gap in stories, and explore new plots. The gameplay is still mesmerizing, although the graphics seem old now - actually not too bad since I have an ATI mobility Radeon 9000 on my laptop. Functions like diverting shield power, laser fire mode and missle lock seriously enhance the experience; you actually feel like you're sitting in the cockpit of an X wing or whatever craft you are flying. The missions are varied too, with a gargantuan repertoire of objectives. Everyone loves hyperspace, and Rebel Alliance gives it to you: Ever imagine what it was like when Han Solo, Luke and good ol' Obi Wan narrowly escaped the star destroyers in the Tatooine system through hyperspace? Just play X Wing Alliance.

5 out of 5, and I'm still inclined to give more!

The learning curve of the game may be quite a bit longer for those who have not played the X Wing series before, but once you get used to the controls, you're in for the joyride of your life! Excellent stuff!

Thank you LUCAS ARTS & TOTALLY GAMES!!! Your OLD GAMES STILL ROCK!!!


Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - good game for the fast computer
this game has some GREAT graphics. the missle trails engine glow and the model details are terrific. the story is a can't wait till next mission story. the AI is incredibly smart. a good game


Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Really captures the spirit of Star Wars
When I first heard about X-wing Alliance, I thought it was just going to be a cheap attempt to drag out the X-wing franchise. But this is an awesome game. Unlike TIE fighter, the gameplay experience has really been increased from the original X-wing in this game. Flying freighter-craft truly is different from flying starfighters - if you try to fly it like an X-wing, you're as good as dead. Also, comapred to pirate starfighters, I could understand why TIE fighters were considered so deadly, a distinction I didn't really get in the original X-wing.

Most importantly, though, when playing this game I truely felt I was in the SW universe. For example, in one early mission during a bacta transfer between the Azzameens and a shady group of pirates I really felt like I was in one of Timothy Zahn's novels. Also, the shuddering of the ships and the multiple explosive and cha-cha-chas of the TIE fighter's laser cannons went a long way towards enhancing the flying experience. The same goes for the planets images during combat, as well as the immensity of some of the space stations.

A couple minor criticisms: the cutscenes don't seem very relevent/ Also, the "big finale" against the Death Star seems to just have been thrown in, and was somewhat of a disappointment. Finally, most of the levels were a little easy - I beat most of them on one try with the setting on hard. I was hoping for a bigger progression in difficulty as the game increased. The Battle of Endor in particular I was hoping would be more fierce.

Overall, however, this is a great game, with an awesome multiplayer platform. The real forte, however, is the single player - this game has great replayability. I would recommend it to anyone. I even enjoyed it more than Rogue Squadron or Rebel Assault and maybe even Jedi Knight.

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