"Come on, join the Dark Side! It'll be fun!"

Star Wars: TIE Fighter is possibly the greatest flight simulation game of all time. It has everything a good game needs: Lies, betrayal, and spaceships carrying lasers and explosives! And, you actually get to be a bad guy for a change. You'll learn something about it, too. After this game, you may see that the ''bad'' guy may not be so bad after all…

In Star Wars: TIE Fighter, you start off as a rookie pilot for the Imperial Navy. After starting out on the training missions, the higher-ups decide you are ready for a real one. You'll fly several missions, battling pirates, Rebels and *gasp* the occasional Imperial traitors. If you can make it back alive, you can earn a reputation and soon Emperor Palpatine himself will be putting his life in your hands.

First off, I'd like to say a good joystick is absolutely necessary to place this game. The game isn't nearly half as fun if you're flying your starfighter with a keyboard or mouse. The joystick I had, a Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro, has a few problems working correctly, but I believe Lucasarts has a patch for it, if you need it.

Gameplay:
The game features mainly objective-based missions. Each of them are very well designed, and vary from reconnaissance, attack, and defense. You start off with a weak starfighter, like an ordinary TIE fighter doing easy missions. If you complete them, eventually they give you a ship that actually has shields and won't be blown apart in about two laser shots, like a TIE Advanced, or a TIE Defender. You'll need it, because missions will get much, much tougher and harder to complete as you go on. Not every mission may go perfectly as planned in the briefing, too. Often you'll be surprised by some unexpected reinforcements, or a rogue ship trying to capture the cargo you're protecting when you least expected it. This simply adds to the experience; I'm sure things don't always turn out the way you want them to in real life anyway. Blasted Calamari Cruisers! Coming out of nowhere…

Sound:
TIE Fighter features great sound, even by today's standards, even though the game is quite a few years old. You can hear every laser blast, torpedo launch, and exploding ship perfectly. There are a lot of voiceovers heard during the game. You get to hear every single briefing as it is given to you, all the comm. messages sent to you during in the middle of a mission, and the voice of anyone speaking during an end cutscene. All of the voiceovers are clear and recognizable instantly; you will definitely have no trouble figuring out what on earth your commanding officer what just said. The music is nice, too. It's appropriate and unique to the game. And the background music, which plays during your mission, helps to enhance the mood; a calm tune will play while the area is clear, while a faster tune will play in the middle of an intense dogfight. The soundtrack is quite memorable; every now and then I find myself humming a few beats, just for the heck of it.

Graphics:
The graphics during the missions consist mostly of polygons. No complex textures, but you aren't going to mind. You'll definitely know what is a Star Destroyer when you see one. The cutscenes are very nice-looking, but they're not exactly awe-inspiring. The one thing I really liked the menus. Instead of a boring old list, you'd click on the docking bay to your ship, or the entranceway to the flight training simulator. For your briefing, you'd click on your commanding officer and the question you want ask him. The menus helped give you the feeling that you were actually an Imperial pilot stationed about a starship in outer space.

Replay Value:
It's going to take a long time to finish TIE Fighter. A single mission could take 15-30 minutes, and you have a ton of them. But once you get going, you are going to enjoy every second of it. All of the missions are somehow connected storyline-wise, and you'll be eager to see what happens next as you complete one mission and begin another one. And when if you do finish the last mission, you might still come back for more, if only to satisfy your urge to blow away some more ''Rebel scum.''

If you've ever seen Star Wars, the original trilogy, and you like the idea of blowing up other spaceships, I think you're going to love this. I can't even remember how much free time I killed with TIE Fighter. And, since the game is quite old, the memory requirements for your computer are quite easy to fulfill. Almost any hunk of junk computer will do. There are difficulty settings on the game, even on easy it can sometimes be quite challenging, but it will never be impossible. If you see this game a computer store or something, you really should pick it up. It probably won't cost that much, at most 15 dollars, but even then it's quite a bargain considering this game is definitely a classic.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 11/14/00, Updated 11/14/00