Star Wars X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter

"Do you have what it takes to be a starfighter pilot?"

OVERVIEW
Following the success of the single player StarWars flight simulator games X-Wing and TIE Fighter, LucasArts designed the next game in the series as a pure multiplayer game. X-Wing vs TIE Fighter (or XvT, as its players usually call it) finally gives us the option to fly together with or against our friends. LucasArts skipped the story here and basically set the game up as a collection of tutorial missions and a selection of melee and combat engagements. Players take the role of either Alliance or Imperial starfighter pilots, flying familiar StarWars craft into battle against each other.

Those who are looking for a complete space flight sim product here with a good storyline and endless hours of single player fun should look somewhere else. But those who have been longing for a chance to blast human opponents out of their TIE cockpits have come to the right place.

MISSION TYPES
The main menu of XvT is called the Datapad. Here you create pilots, review past scores and set up your games. There are a couple of different game types to choose from:

Training
Most of these missions are meant as tutorials, to familiarize yourself with the game and the controls. They are flown by 1 or 2 players, and have fairly easy objectives (with one or two exceptions which are very tough). There are a few large training missions specifically for either the Rebel or the Imperial side, supporting up to 8 players. These are meant to be semi-competitive: although you're on the same side and are trying to achieve the same goals, each player tries to get the highest score by scoring kills and completing important objectives before their teammates do.

Melee
The simplest kind of game, and most often played online. In the most basic kind of melee, all players pick a starfighter, and fly against each other for a set time, usually 10 minutes. Whenever a player is killed, he gets a new craft and is returned to the fray instantly. The goal is, of course, to score more kills than your opponent(s). Slightly more complicated melees include team action (such as two vs two games), cargo races (four rival teams each trying to destroy more undefended cargo ships than the other teams) and mineclearing (racing to destroy as many mines as possible).

Combat engagement
The heart of the game, these engagements are well-matched contests between Rebel and Imperial teams. There are 16 different combat engagements in the game, in which the two sides meet each other in different situations. A few examples are a Rebel starfighter attack on an Imperial platform, an Imperial ambush of Rebel cargo freighters in an asteroid field, and a chance meeting between two Frigates and their starfighter complements.
Each combat engagement can be played in single player mode, as part of either team, or in multiplayer, with up to four players on each side. An 8 player combat engagement with 4 players on each side is by far the most interesting kind of XvT game.

In addition to these three basics game types, two variants exist: the Tournament and the Battle.

Tournament
A tournament is basically a collection of different melees which are played directly after each other. All points scored in each individual melee are totalled, and the winner of the tournament is the one who has the highest total score at the end.

Battle
Similar to the tournament, this is a collection of combat engagements. At the start of the battle, a number of required victories is chosen. Then, missions are played until either the Rebel or the Imperial side has won that number of missions, at which point they win the entire battle.

Since the tournaments and battles use the same melees and combat engagements that can also be played one at a time, they do not actually add to the total number of missions available. Between training, melees and engagements, roughly 50 different missions are available. Although this may seem like a lot, it is actually not such an impressive tally; the training missions are short and simple, and most have been imported directly from the last game in the series, TIE Fighter. The melees are even simpler in design. Only the combat engagements look like a lot of time has gone into making them, and there are only 16 of these.

All in all, the number of different missions in XvT is unimpressive, but particularly the combat engagements are good in quality. The game does not come with a mission editor, unfortunately, but a third party freeware editor called XvTED is available for those who wish to try their hand at making their own missions.

AVAILABLE CRAFT
Every mission is flown in one of the Alliance's or the Empire's starfighters. The Rebel player has four craft to choose from: the versatile X-Wing, the heavy Y-Wing bomber, the quick A-Wing interceptor, or an older model, the Z-95 Headhunter. This last model is not as powerful as the rest, but is sometimes flown in melees against other Z-95 pilots, and is the only craft you get in some of the tougher combat engagements.
The Imperial player has four different TIE models and one heavier fighter to choose from. The basic TIE Fighter is a quick but very vulnerable craft. The TIE Interceptor is much better, and meant for dogfights. The TIE Bomber, as its name implies, is used for bombing runs. In some missions, the Imperial player gets to fly the powerful TIE Advanced, an upgrade from the Interceptor model which is easily the best fighter in the game. Finally, the heavier Assault Gunboat can be used for a variety of missions, and is many Imperial players' favorite. At least it doesn't break down under fire as quickly as a TIE.

As can be expected, what craft you fly in a certain engagement or melee strongly affects the flight engine. Each craft has its own top speed, turn rate, durability and weapons configuration. As a result, some craft are better suited for certain missions than others, and in melees, many players have a favorite craft type that suits their flying style best.

CONTROLS
One thing that should be mentioned first is that XvT requires a joystick to be played. It's not just convenient to have one; the game won't run without it. Fortunately this is clearly indicated on the box.
Within the game, you have a host of different options to move your craft, adjust the settings of your laser cannons and shields, and find your enemies. For instance, there are seven different options to target other craft during a mission. These include targeting the nearest enemy that is attacking you, targeting the nearest craft that is important to a mission objective, and targeting a missile that has been launched at you, so you can shoot it down. Fortunately for veterans of X-Wing and TIE Fighter, all options that were already in those games are still triggered with the same keys.

With so many keys to use, it can get a little hard to find the option you need in the heat of combat. LucasArts was thoughtful enough to provide an easy in-game option to link any of the game's options to joystick buttons. If you have one of those 20-button sticks, you can use them all. A definite plus, although I myself prefer to use the keyboard like I have been doing with the previous games for eight years.

TAKING IT ONLINE
Since X-Wing vs TIE Fighter is mainly meant as a multiplayer game, and the best place to find other players is on the Internet, a few thoughts regarding online play are in order.

Although XvT is an old game by now, a large Internet community still exists. This is mostly because of the existence of the Week of War tournaments hosted by Battlestats. Every month, roughly a hundred XvT clans participate in this online melee tournament. I myself am a member of one of these clans, and I can definitely recommend joining one if you intend to play XvT online.

Also, when playing online, connection quality can be a real problem. Depending on how many players you have, where they live and what kind of connection they are using, the game may suffer serious performance hits. This is true with any online game, of course, but even a little latency can be a nightmare in XvT. Serious latency problems (or 'lag' as online gamers call it) can cause weird things in XvT, such as apparent hits that don't cause damage, enemy craft jumping from one place to another, and enemy laser shots becoming invisible (but just as deadly).
Although the box states that XvT can be played with an 28.8 kb modem, I wouldn't try with anything less than 56k. Cable or better is nice, but 56k modems can do the job, assuming you do not try to play with more than 4 players at a time.

It is somewhat unfortunate that combat engagements are rarely played online because they tend to have more lag. Similarly, the quickest starfighters (the A-Wing and the TIE Advanced) are not used because they 'jump around' much more. 90% of all online games are simple one versus one or two versus two melees, not because they are the best part of the game, but because they suffer the smallest performance hits for online games. XvT only truly shines on local area networks, where the 8-player combat engagements that make the game so spectacular can be realistically played.

GRAPHICS
The graphics of X-Wing vs TIE Fighter have improved a lot since the previous game in the series, TIE Fighter. While not exactly state of the art, all starfighter and capital ship models have been redone in a lot of colored detail. Originally XvT did not support a 3dfx graphics mode, but a patch has been released which adds this functionality as well. This patch can be downloaded from the LucasArts site (www.lucasarts.com), and is also included with XvT's expansion set, Balance of Power.

Particularly improved from the previous games are the capital ships. In X-Wing, a Calamari Cruiser or a Star Destroyer was one big, grey mass. In TIE Fighter, they looked a little truer to the movies. Finally, in XvT, they look almost as good as they do in the movies, and individual components like laser turrets and sensor arrays can clearly be spotted on the hull (and, in fact, shot off).

The game has a lot of different graphic options to fine tune, such as how spectacular explosions look, and whether or not you see small asteroids and other space debris. Every craft in the game has both a high detail and a low detail model, and you can set at which distance the game switches between these two models. By turning everything all the way up, the game's looks can be improved a lot. For better performance (particularly online), turning them down can help.

SOUND
XvT comes with all the familiar and well-loved sounds of a StarWars game. Old favorites like the zap of a Rebel laser and the 'howl' of a passing TIE Fighter are there. In an X-Wing or a Y-Wing, you can hear your R2 astromech droid warning you of new developments and screeching if you take critical damage. Wingmen can be heard chattering as they destroy enemy fighters or fall under attack. There are 6 different wingman voices for both the Rebel and the Imperial sides. Naturally, the Imps all sounds British while the Rebs sound American. Additionally, both sides have a mission commander who congratulates you if you win and scolds you if you lose, and a few of the training missions have mission-specific spoken dialogue. The combat engagements don't have this feature, unfortunately.

As for music, it's all classic stuff, nothing a StarWars fan hasn't heard before. However, unlike in the previous games, XvT's music is performed by an orchestra and is directly played from the CD. It sounds a lot better than the midis on X-Wing and on TIE Fighter, but one disadvantage is that the music is constant. In the previous games, music would change to suit mission developments: calm when there is no danger, picking up speed if there are enemies nearby, bursting into the first notes of the Imperial March when a Star Destroyer enters the area, that sort of thing. XvT lacks that. Also, playing music from the CD can slow the game down on systems that match the game's minimum requirements only barely, and users of older machines may want to turn their music off to improve game speed. You will certainly want to do so in online games.

One thing that I liked is that the game's music can also be played on a regular CD player, and that all spoken text in the game can be found on the CD in .WAV format, so that you can use these files for other purposes (Windows sounds, for instance) or replace them with other .WAVs if you like.

CHALLENGE
For a newcomer to the X-Wing space flight sim series, X-Wing vs TIE Fighter can be a hard game to figure out. There are many options to work with, and learning how to dogfight properly is a long, arduous task. The game's tutorial missions help out a little, but not much. Eventually you will have to learn for yourself.
Once you've mastered the basics (or if you already have experience with one or both of the previous games), many of the combat engagements can be challenging. There are three difficulty levels to choose: Easy, Medium and Hard. Level settings affect the skill of your wingmen, your enemies and in some missions, the number and type of enemy craft. Typically, missions are almost impossible to complete on Hard unless you are playing cooperative multiplayer games. Medium setting is best for single player games, and Easy is suitable for beginning players.

Even someone who is a master at mission flying can still have challenging online melees, since good melee flying depends on different skills than good mission flying. The average skill level of online Week of War players is very high in XvT, so anyone who joins the community at this point will have a real challenge becoming good enough to fly with the best. Do you have what it takes to be a starfighter pilot? Only one way to find out.

TOP PERFORMANCE
Some of XvT's best features include:

- Good flight engine and good control;
- Good mix of different combat engagements;
- Great music and very serviceable graphics.

REPRIMAND
XvT has a few flaws, namely:

- No storyline whatsoever;
- No in-built mission editor / random mission option (third party mission editor exists, however);
- Low number of missions;
- Good connection needed or playing online has lag issues.

CONCLUSION
You should not buy X-Wing vs TIE Fighter if you do not intend to play multiplayer games at some point. It has good single player options, but that's not where the game's focus lies. Also, this game is not for you if you are hoping for a good storyline. In that case you should go for X-Wing Alliance instead.

However, if you want a solid space flight sim with a good flight engine and extensive multiplayer capabilities, and you have a 56k or better Internet connection, this game will definitely please you. I recommend you look for the Balance of Power expansion as well, it does much to offset two of the game's main problems, namely the lack of a storyline and the low number of missions. See you in the cockpit, and may the Force be with you!

RELEVANT LINKS
For those who intend to take XvT online, here are two useful links:

Microsoft Gaming Zone (www.zone.com) - Popular online gaming spot, this is your best chance of finding opponents.

Battlestats (www.battlestats.com) - Host of the Week of War tournaments which are the biggest online XvT event. You will
also find links to individual clan websites here, should you wish to join one.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 04/19/01, Updated 04/19/01