I love the sense that this is connected to a larger story, but giving a little more context within the mission of that story would be nice. Some additional comm messages would be nice; who are these additional ships that show up? Would also be nice if those lines were voiced; even bad voice acting would be nice, because I don't have time to read messages while dogfighting. The mission itself is probably too easy, so long as you employ the usual tactics of jumping on craft exiting the hangar.

It's a small niggle, but not starting in a home area really breaks with the consistent pattern of XWA missions. I think I understand the choice; it takes over a minute to get to the action as-is, so perhaps it is for the best, but it did feel a bit jarring to go from exiting your hangar to suddenly in the mission area, with no mothership anywhere. Maybe have the mothership hyper out right away, saying they'll be back in a few minutes?

The twist is interesting, but it's not worth any points, and doesn't go anywhere, so it ends up being...purposeless. After the main objective is done, the mission is just waves and waves of T/As and GUNs against XWs and AWs, which is extremely dull on the higher difficulty, when 8 rebel craft just erase every imperial craft they gang up on. Give some reason for the continued carnage, maybe use that twist to give it all purpose?

Solid, straightforward mission; as it says itself, very reminiscent of some of the later missions in the original TIE Fighter campaign.

The battle has a solid concept, but fails to really deliver on it. Some voiced lines would really help; it's impossible to read the text messages while dogfighting. There are a few niggling issues with the missions, but nothing egregious.

Love the extra effort of the voice files in the briefing, mission, and debriefing. Love the choice to knock of early or get in some extra work; never thought of using the nav buoys as a way of implementing player choice! The mission was a bit too easy (the T/D is just so strong).

Wonderfully intense, really feels like an in-universe mission.

Good mission, nice and intense, requiring some quick work to not get overwhelmed.

I liked that, for once, it felt like a fully-fledged operation, where the attacker shows up with overwhelming force. It does make the mission a little simplistic, since the fighters are using ion cannons, the additional waves don't show up because the first wave just get disabled; obviously it's a limitation of the mission editor and the game, but then missions should be designed with that in mind.

There is absolutely no reason to pack three missions into one by packing different flight groups in the difficulty levels. Just make three different missions! The by-product of this design is that you end up with non-sensical goals (in one mission, I think I was instructed to protect a convoy that didn't exist?) and badly arranged units that now have to work for three different missions if they're shared between them all. There is inherently a lot of same-ness in XvT missions, but things REALLY end up feeling the same when you see the same goals over and over and OVER. Pathing for the capital ships is problematic, friendly capital ships really don't seem interested in joining the firefight, so they just fly around contributing almost nothing.

Nice little story that grows as the missions progress. Some minor quibbles about capital ship paths running into other capital ship paths, especially on the last mission. Also, I enjoy the main idea behind the last mission, but it'd be nice if there was more opportunity to use the tractor there. It seemed ramming was the only real option.

Show up and kill everything, as a mission type, is pretty dull at this point. Having to inspect the transports during the firefight adds a little bit of interest; more of that would have been nice.

Solid mission with some interesting decisions to make (i.e., when to defend the VSD, when to defend the Interdictor), but could have used a bump up to a climactic finish. The shuttles seem to just appear to be killed, and don't bring any tension to the end of the mission.

I appreciate the attempt at building a story, but it's unfortunate the battle can't make use of cutscenes between missions to do so, leaving the after-action screens to cover the information normally covered there, in the format normally used.

The battle feels like it builds to the penultimate mission, with the final mission just feeling tacked on. I get the fun of seeing the Sovereign in action, but maybe the story should have been constructed in such a way that we use it against what we've been fighting, rather than some nameless warlord all of a sudden. Ultimately, it robs the battle of any payoff, leaving the experience feeling somewhat empty.

Mission 4 seems designed with the expectation of using unlimited ammo. There is a reload craft, but it only has a few rounds of reloads before it flies home, not nearly enough to take down a SSD's shields BY YOURSELF. The other missile boats on your side follow the usual procedure of locking on to a target before launching, so, of course, all of their warheads just get shot down. I can appreciate it may be difficult to balance a mission like this, but just giving up with the caveat that unlimited ammo solves the problem is incredibly disappointing.