The major thing I feel is lacking from this title is a true feel and spirit of dogfighting. While it is mostly unrealistic it would have added to the fun factor for the game. Many levels you can sit a fair distance away from the enemies and just pick them off with guns and missiles. Yawn! Additionally I rarely felt or recall seeing that my ship was ever in danger of any sort. Then suddenly you’re in danger of exploding and boom you’re dead.

Multiple pieces of missions consist of nothing but flying straight from where you are to a nav point. These could have been completely removed from the game and made the game smaller and better. Or they could have replaced them with something useful I think. Also in between missions there’s often no chance to refit your ship or repair it. I found out that some of these useless missions are meant to do just that. It seems that they expected everyone to go off and start shooting asteroids randomly without any instructions and in those asteroids there are powerups and useful things that will help you along the way. An odd way to proceed considering in one level I was escorting an armada, I would think they would have been able to supply me with a stack of armaments and repairs.

In fact in many of the missions it seems like you should take the time to destroy the asteroids because many of them will give you valuable power ups. But balancing that and not getting your ship blown to pieces can prove difficult and I feel that it’s an unnecessary part of the gameplay. The really poor thing is that it seems that the powerups are not permanent and that they do not transfer from one level to another even within the same mission. So essentially as the game gets more difficult, your capabilities remain the same. Not at all what I would call good game balancing to say the least. Much of my time on the game became trying numerous times to pass one specific level. Fun? Hardly.