TIE FIGHTER gets a stunning fan-made remake

The iconic 1994 video game TIE Fighter has gotten a comprehensive remake from fans.

TIE Fighter: Total Conversion is a mod for X-Wing Alliance, the 1999 semi-sequel to TIE Fighter featuring a much better engine. The mod is a spinoff of the X-Wing Alliance Upgrade mod, which replaces all of the game's models and textures with much more modern equivalents whilst retaining the classic gameplay.

The game revamps all 13 campaigns from the original game and its two expansions, for a total of 104 missions. The game also features 41 "reimagined" missions, with many more ships (including the Super Star Destroyer Executor in some cases) added to the original missions to dramatically increase the size and scope of the battles. The mod also, impressively, supports VR.

To play the game, you'll need a copy of X-Wing: Alliance from GoG, a download and install of the X-Wing Alliance Upgrade mod, and a download and install of the TIE Fighter: Total Conversion mod, all of which are fairly self-explanatory.

Star Wars: Squadrons

In the aftermath of the Battle of Endor, the Rebel Alliance has become the New Republic. But the new government is still gathering its strength and the Galactic Empire, fragmenting as it is, still has a vast fleet at its disposal. The Republic has a secret project it hopes will swing the conflict in its favour and assigns Vanguard Squadron to help secure it, but the Empire has learned of the project's existence. The legendary Titan Squadron is given a new mission: to locate the Republic's Project Starhawk and destroy it.

Back in February 1999 I eagerly queued up to buy X-Wing Alliance, the fourth game in Lawrence Holland and Totally Games' X-Wing series. If you'd told me than that it would take almost twenty-two years to get a follow-up I'd have flat-out disbelieved you. The X-Wing series had fantastic graphics (for the time), superb gameplay that matched accessibility with tactical depth and told pretty good stories in the Star Wars setting, and was going from strength to strength. Unfortunately X-Wing Alliance's quality was not rewarded by strong sales. In fact, the entire space combat genre fell off a cliff that year, with Freespace 2 also bombing despite being arguably the greatest game ever made of that type.

When EA confirmed earlier this year they were making a spiritual successor to that series, under the name Star Wars: Squadrons, there was widespread scepticism. EA's highly promising 2013 development deal with Lucasfilm to deliver multiple Star Wars games had delivered exactly three major games, the so-so multiplayer shooters Battlefront and Battlefront II, which were fun but lacking much depth (Battlefront II did come with a very short single-player story campaign), and the very solid Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. With EA's reputation for filling their games with different ways of draining money from players, there was a fear Squadrons would end up disappointing.

Much to everyone's surprise, Squadrons is actually a very solid game. It consists of a single-player campaign and two multiplayer modes, with absolutely no microtransactions of any kind. The game has even launched at around half the price of a normal, new release in 2020. It does have some weaknesses, but it gets much closer to the highs of the X-Wing series than most people expected.

As with the X-Wing series, you follow a series of missions (fourteen plus a super-sized prologue, which the game counts as two different missions) which tell a story. Unlike the X-Wing games, there's a huge focus on your wingmen and squad mates, which both Vanguard and Titan squadrons having an interesting roster of new characters, each with their own backstory and personality. You can talk to your fellow pilots during mission briefings and on the hanger deck to get some more insight on the story and the objectives. There's no great shakes here - the game's writing is functional at best - but it's a nice touch and a solid growth from the older games where your team-mates had no development whatsoever. Unfortunately it also removes some tension from the game, as your squad-mates are all essential characters and can't die mid-mission. 

Once in the cockpit, the fun kicks in. You can pilot your fighter via mouse-and-keyboard, gamepad or joystick, with an array of UI aids that you can switch on or off depending on your skill level. You can also set the degree of the simulation and customise controls. The flight model is very solid, being mostly arcade-like but with the ability to shut down engines, glide and then boost in a different direction which can lead to some nifty manoeuvres. It's not a patch on, say, Elite: Dangerous' flight model but it's an improvement on the old X-Wing series. There's also greater control over your power systems, with shunting all power to engines charging up an afterburner-like boost, or shunting all power to shields allowing you to overcharge them. There's more options for equipment as well, such as a hull repair droid you can use to fix hull damage mid-mission (vital equipment for unshielded TIE fighters, in particular). There's far more customisation options then there ever was in the 1990s games, which adds a surprising amount of depth.

The game is definitely not the disposable arcade blaster some were fearing, although there are some concessions to less-hardcore modern games. The game is more forgiving about allowing your laser blasts to hit as long as your target is in the reticule and far more forgiving about damage. As well as the hull repair robot and the shields on Republic ships, calling for a resupply will also fix hull damage, and your support ship may repair you even if if you haven't called for aid if you take an unexpected pounding. There is a cooldown on the repair options, though, so you can't spam repair orders to get through tough situations.

The missions are surprisingly inventive, rarely pitting you into battles in open space devoid of features. Instead you find yourself fighting in a nebula which impacts on sensors, in an asteroid field, in the atmosphere of Yavin where diving too deep may fry your fighter, or in a massive scrapyard where you have to dodge debris and use ejected power cores as makeshift mines. The constant inventiveness at times strains credulity - a few more battles against a more traditional space background would have been nice - but certainly keeps the game interesting.

There is a draw back with the colourful backdrops, the impressive explosions and huge glowing laser blasts, that sometimes the noise of it overloads the UI and you loose track of where your targeting reticule is pointing or the status of your engine booster. This problem is accentuated by the fact you can't switch off the (impressive, it has to be said) 3D cockpits as in X-Wing Alliance, or go third-person as in all previous X-Wing games, which would help clear up the problem. Some of the feedback in the game is also a bit variable: missiles in particular feel poorly-rendered, looking like big fireballs your blast out of your ship rather than warheads.

Still, the flight model is mostly great and blasting enemy fighters out of the sky is impressive and fun. There have been concessions which occasionally make the game feel a bit arcadier than the old X-Wing games, but these are balanced out by even more options for customisability and controls.

The biggest issue with the game is value for money. If you enjoy playing singleplayer and multiplayer, the game is an easy recommendation. If you want the game for just singleplayer, it becomes more questionable. The 16-mission campaign will take you less than ten hours to complete (I finished it at 9.5 hours, but that includes leaving the game on for an hour whilst I had dinner and a fair degree of faffing around with my control setup, so 8 hours would easily be doable). You can also fly in the multiplayer mode against bots, which is a nice feature you don't see often any more, which can extend the playing time out quite a bit, but I doubt you'll get more than 15-20 hours out of the game for single player-only content. Multiplayer gamers with no interest in the story mode may also find the content the game ships with a bit on the weak side: there are only six maps and two multiplayer modes, and there's no more than 10 human players in a match (even when there's way more fighters present in a battle, with the rest being controlled by the AI).

The game has launched at half-price, which certainly makes up for this issue to a point, but without more free post-launch content, it's still questionable if the game is worth the price. However, it also does feel like this could be the launching platform for something bigger. If it does well, a sequel with a more elaborate campaign or an expansion which adds more ships (the B-wing and TIE Advanced/Defender feel like egregious absences) is a possibility.

Star Wars: Squadrons (***½) is a solid and respectful follow-up to the X-Wing series, even if it can't match those earlier games in terms of story and the length of the singleplayer campaign. It is often inventive and entertaining, with a great flight model and fun combat, but it's questionable if there's enough meat here to satisfy long-starved space combat fans, not when X-Wing Alliance is available cheaply from GoG with a huge number of mods available to spruce up the visuals. This could be the foundation to something more interesting down the line. The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

New STAR WARS dogfighting game announced

EA has announced a new Star Wars game focused on space combat, to launch this October. The new game is being touted as a spiritual successor to the X-Wing and Rogue Squadron series.

Star Wars: Squadrons is set just after the events of the original Star Wars trilogy and sees the player and up to four friends forming a special elite unit within either the Imperial Navy or the Rebel Alliance.  There is a single-player campaign, playable solo or in coop, as well as multiplayer modes built around the idea of 5v5 team dogfighting.

The X-Wing series consisted of four mainline titles: X-Wing (1993), TIE Fighter (1994), X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter (1997) and X-Wing: Alliance (1999). These were predominantly single-player games (apart from the multiplayer-focused X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, although an expansion added a full campaign mode) with robust multiplayer. There is still an active modding and multiplayer scene for X-Wing: Alliance.

Predominantly released for PC, the X-Wing series prioritised a more realistic flight model and strategic player, with players able to shift power from one system to another, deal with combat damage and order AI wingmen to assist them.

The Rogue Squadron series consists of three titles: Rogue Squadron (1998), Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader (2001) and Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike (2003). The first game was released on PC and Nintendo 64, the latter two on the Nintendo GameCube. These games featured a much less sophisticated flight model and controls and were more aimed at arcade blasting, but were great fun for what they were. Rebel Strike notably added the ability to control ground units such as AT-STs.

It's unclear if Squadrons is leaning more towards the X-Wing or Rogue Squadron end of the spectrum, but at one point the damaged X-wing shunts power to its engines to evade an enemy, suggesting that mechanic will be present in the new game. The game will also please fans, featuring as it does appearances by fan-favourite characters Wedge Antilles (from the original trilogy movies) and Hera Syndulla (from Star Wars: Rebels).

Star Wars: Squadrons will launch on 2 October on PC, X-Box One and PlayStation 4. The game will not feature microtransactions and will have crossplay enabled, allowing players on all three formats to mingle. The game will also be fully compatible with all PC and PS4 virtual reality headsets.

Wertzone Classics: Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance

The Rebel Alliance has been dealt a severe blow with the destruction of its base on Hoth. In the aftermath of the disaster, numerous factions sympathetic to the Alliance have been exposed and the Empire has taken vengeance. Caught up in the chaos are the Azzameens, a trading family supplying the Rebels. With the Empire closing in, the youngest pilot in the family elects to the join the Rebels and help in the fight. However, his loyalties to his familes remain strong...

X-Wing Alliance was originally released in 1999 and is the fourth and final game in the X-Wing series, following on from X-Wing (1993), TIE Fighter (1994) and the multiplayer-focused X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter (1997). The game opens during the events of The Empire Strikes Back and concludes with the epic Battle of Endor from Return of the Jedi, with the player helping flesh out events in the background of both movies.

X-Wing Alliance is, technically, the most accomplished game in the series. The graphics are far superior to the earlier games and the fighter cockpits are now all fully-modelled 3D environments which you can look around in. The game has the widest variety of ships and stations in the series and bumps things up a notch by allowing you play small freighters, such as the YT-1300 and 2000-series Corellien freighters and, in the final mission, the Millennium Falcon itself. The game also unfolds over a larger scale, with many missions requiring multiples jumps through hyperspace to other star systems. The engine can handle far vaster battles than the previous game, with the concluding Battle of Endor involving over a dozen capital ships and hundreds of fighters. The game also makes excellent use of the movie soundtracks and sound effects to form the perfect backdrop to the game.

It remains controversial over if this is the best game in the series, however. For my money it is. It has the best pacing, the best difficulty curve (one or two insanely hard spikes aside) and a growing sense of menace and scale as the assault on the second Death Star approaches. There are 50 missions, which is a lot for this kind of game (the others only reached this size with their expansions included), especially since many of these missions are longer than the very longest missions in the previous titles. It's certainly a big, satisfying game which takes the previous mixture of spectacular space combat, in-battle tactics and larger strategy (through the ability to give wingmen orders, which they handle better than ever before thanks to much stronger AI) and tightens everything up a notch.

The biggest weakness - and it is not a major one - is the storyline involving the Azzameen family. Ignoring their silly name (and you even sillier designation as "Ace"), this storyline does get you involved in the game a bit more than in its forebears, which gave your character no backstory at all. However, the game forces you to sit through several fairly tiresome family-oriented missions before you get to the join the Rebellion and hop in an X-wing. The addition of freighters to the game is a good one, but these end up being a bit overpowered due to their auto-tracking turrets. This is especially notable in the YT-2000 Otana, which has two gun batteries and requires you to merely be pointed in the enemy's vague direction to scythe through entire squadrons - even of TIE Avengers and Defenders - with impunity. These missions can be a bit more fun as they involve characters not associated with the Rebels, such as your crazy sister Amon and even crazier brother Emon (not the most exciting names), and your psychotic droid co-pilot MK-09 (a slightly less homicidal forerunner of HK-47). They bring a bit more personality to a game series that was, until this title, rather lacking in personality.

One slight problem with this story is that it's not entirely concluded at the end of the game. The Azzameen storyline ends on a cliffhanger with a traitor being exposed in the family and doing a runner. Clearly, his pursuit would have factored into any expansion to the game. However, X-Wing Alliance suffered badly in the Great Space Combat Crash of 1999, selling disappointingly, and no expansion or sequel was made. Fortunately the game's core storyline finishes fairly decisively with the Battle of Endor, which provides more than enough closure for the whole game.

X-Wing Alliance's other big problem was one of timing. The X-Wing series had comfortably usurped the Wing Commander franchise's crown as Best Space Combat Series and worn it well through the 1990s, but just a few months before X-Wing Alliance came out another game was released. Conflict Freespace: The Great War was, despite a dodgy name, an altogether hardier and better game, with superior, more visceral combat, better visuals and far weightier handling. It left the X-Wing series looking a bit tired. Even worse was to come when Freespace 2 was released about six months after X-Wing Alliance. Freespace 2 was space combat perfected and pretty much killed the entire genre stone dead by not giving it anywhere to develop.

Freed from contemporary issues, X-Wing Alliance (****½) emerges as a still impressive, top-notch game. It is available now from GoG. Unlike the earlier X-Wing games, which were made before the modding scene took off, X-Wing Alliance allowed modding and the results include the impressive X-Wing Upgrade project, which improves the visuals massively of the whole game. I strongly recommend it as it both upgrades the in-game models to something far palatable for modern gamers, and also adds widescreen support for current monitors.

GoG's journey to the awesome side is (nearly) complete

GoG.com has released an additional six Star Wars games to its library. X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, X-Wing Alliance, Galactic Battlegrounds, Dark Forces, Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords and Battlefront II are the new additions.

A non-optimum situation.

All are worthwhile purchases. Battlefront II is a multiplayer-focused shoot 'em up, with somewhat dated visuals but still fun gameplay. Knights of the Old Republic II is the far more conceptually interesting (but also far more broken) sequel to one of the greatest RPGs ever made. Incomplete on release, mods have repaired a lot of the damage and allowed the game to flourish. Dark Forces is Doom with a Star Wars skin, but still awesome. Galactic Battlegrounds is Age of Empires II with a Star Wars skin, but still pretty good.

The two X-Wing games are probably going to be the key draw here. X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter is multiplayer-focused and the multiplayer is a bit flaky on the GoG version of the game at the moment. However, the single-player Balance of Power campaign is included and is very worthwhile. More impressive is X-Wing Alliance, the final game in the series. Released in 1999, the game is the most epic in the series and the largest, featuring a lengthy campaign culminating in the full-scale assault on the second Death Star at the Battle of Endor. It's the most visually impressive of the four games (and also the easiest to update to modern standards through mods), although hardcore fans will argue only the second-best, behind the more morally ambiguous TIE Fighter.

Apparently more Star Wars games are still to come, likely to comprise some or all of the remaining Dark Forces series (Jedi Knight, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy), possibly the well-regarded Republic Commando or the more acquired taste of Supremacy (aka Rebellion). We may also get to see the flawed-but-ambitious Force Commander, with Rebel Assault also an outside possibility. Beyond that we are likely to see some more serious scraping of the barrel. It's also possible we will see some of the newer games, like the Empire at War strategy title or the two Force Unleashed titles.

It looks like between these old games, the release of Battlefront III later this year and of course the arrival of Episode VII: The Force Awakens in December, it's a good time to be a Star Wars fan.

X-WING and TIE FIGHTER re-released

GoG have teamed up with LucasArts to re-release the classic space combat sims X-Wing and TIE Fighter. The games will be available from GoG within the next day.

Released in 1993, X-Wing was a blatant attempt by LucasArts to cash in on the success of Chris Roberts's Wing Commander series by deploying the heavy firepower of the Star Wars universe. Employing then-cutting-edge 3D graphics and a finely-tuned power balancing mechanic, X-Wing managed to be better than its rival and was a superb - if extremely tough - game. Released a year later, TIE Fighter was even better, with a gripping storyline casting the player as an ordinary pilot unfortunately employed by the bad guys.

The series continued in 1997 with the multiplayer-focused X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, although it did feature an excellent, story-based expansion called Balance of Power. In 1999 the series concluded with the epic X-Wing Alliance.

At this stage, only the original X-Wing and TIE Fighter are being re-released from the series. Both games have been updated to work with modern PCs and the GoG editions include both the original versions and their 1998 re-releases, which are the same but use the much more advanced graphics engine from X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter. X-Wing will include both its expansions (Imperial Pursuit and B-Wing) whilst TIE Fighter will include its Defender of the Empire expansion.

Both games are excellent and I can recommend getting them both. However, they require joysticks (or, at the very least, gamepads) to play properly.

In additional news, LucasArts classics Sam and Max Hit the Road, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Knights of the Old Republic are likewise being re-released tomorrow. Knights of the Old Republic is highly recommended, as the previous PC version required a little bit of tinkering to get working properly (its sequel generally works absolutely fine). This version should work with modern graphics cards and operating systems out of the box.

GoG have said that they will ultimately be releasing thirty LucasArts titles over the coming months, suggesting that the overwhelming bulk of the LucasArts archive will eventually be available.

Rumourville: PS3 turn-based classic Valkyria Chronicles is also, curiously, getting a PC release many years after the original release.