Description
Take out two Cain destoyers in a preliminary strke against a major Shivan supply depot.

Storyline:
The story here isn't especially bad, but it's not especially good either. It pretty much lingers right there in limbo. It would have rated a better score had there been some sort of in-flight messages to support the story, although this mission is pretty straight forward, it would have been nice to have some chatter relevant to the action going on (note to designers: This is ALWAYS a good thing. You can't go wrong with in-flight messages, use as many as possible.). Briefing and debriefing are functional and flow fairly well between stages, despite some difficulties with spelling in a few places.

Balance:
By any standard, this mission is very easy, and most will successfully complete it with hull strengths above 90, even in a Valk (My ship of choice, btw.). There are some strange problems with the loadout, namely the strange choices in the number of ships and weapons that the author made available. They are actually less than the defaults in most cases, most notably the single Herc and Athena available. Weapons are all defaulted to 5 extra, including hornets, which is very odd, considering that the time was taken to set the numbers of ships available, but not the weapons. In the actual mission, you will find that you have to destroy a Lilith and a Cain, but the Lilith is already heavily damaged, and doesn't last much longer than the Cain. There are a total of 5 enemy wings, but they all have a single wave and only one is set to arrive on a delay, so once that first bunch of ships is out of the way, no more show up. Disabling and scanning the enemy freighters is very easy, especially considering that there are no ships set to defend them. Overall, this mission is way too easy, despite problems with the loadout.

Design:
Once again, all ships are on the same y-plane, which is really annoying from a design perspective. On the whole, design is functional, but somewhat slipshod throughout. This mission mainly works because its premise is simple and requires no complicated design. Ships are named, and most have initial orders set, but other areas, such as setting up waves or arrival cues are totally unused. Running this mission through one of the many design checklists would probably help a lot, but what this mission really needs is some pizzaz to help it out. As it stands now, the straightforward design is very boring and is saved from total uselessness by the incredible AI programmed into the game.

Gameplay:
Like I said, this mission is very boring, especially when compared to some of the incredible missions and campaigns that are available now. Its age shows badly now, over a year after its release. We've all played a similar mission by now (Heck, even I made a mission with a similar premise back in January), and this doesn't really have any redeeming features that make it worth the download.

Other Thoughts:
I'm trying to get back on track with reviews here, but somehow <a href="http://www.systemone.com/">work</a> keeps interfering with my online activities. At least I got a raise last week.