Description
If you love dogfighters...I mean really love dogfightes. This is something for you. Add-up all the shivian fighers, you get a number above 5000! Don't worry, they don't come at you all at once. Think your a pro? Set difficulty on hard and try it. All you really have to do is live through five minutes of the mission. After that I call off the fighters. Sounds easy no?

Storyline:
As "Designer" states, this mission certainly won't appeal to everyone. The briefing recommends that you play this mission for (1) target practice, (2) the challenge of fighting more than 100 Shivans, or (3) to satisfy your love of dogfighting. Fair enough. A training or challenge mission is certainly fair game. <p> But, unfortunately, the designer also makes a half-hearted attempt to include a story as well. The "supposed" story is that the GTI discovered the cause for the Shivan invasion of Terran space -- there is a system with three jump "gates" situated so closely together that a portal can be created for quick trips through subspace. This bold move attempts to recreate the Shivans and the reason for the Shivan invasion. <p> It could have worked if done well, but the story of the GTI chasing a Shivan Lucifer before it reaches the cluster of jump nodes turns out to be only a sham. After you enter the mission, the Shivan Lucifer jumps out and the "Designer" interrupts a message to give an extremely out of character comment: "<i>I told ya there would be lots of shivians, tell ya what, if you can surive for about five minutes, I'll call them off...Deal?</i>" So, the designer misuses the literary "deus ex machina" -- where the author writes themselves into a corner and can't warp up the story without an act of a God or Goddess. Why bother? Just simply stating calling it a training mission or a real mission against impossible odds would have been acceptable. Trying to do both, and doing a poor job at that, simply ruined my suspension of disbelief. I felt cheated.

Balance:
This mission is very poorly balanced. And not in favor of the Shivans, suprisingly. Quite simply, there are not 5000 Shivans. Maybe 100 at most, but not for long. All 17 Terran fighters arrive in the mission at the same time, but the Shivans arrive in waves. Only one Shivan wave arrives at a time (even though there are a few different Shivan wings), so the Terran fighters simply wipe out the Shivans as soon as they jump in. Might as well have warped in hundreds of target drones, since none of these dogs gets away for a dogfight. Worst of all, the dogs aren't even let loose...only a few Shivans actually arrive in the mission due to a glaring desgin flaw. <p> Put another way, even the default ship loadout of all LOKIs would have no problems annihilating the Shivans on Medium difficulty. I doubt that there would be a challenge in this mission even at higher difficulty levels. <p> Even the loadout is inadequate. Only five of each fighter (including those from Silent Threat) are available to choose from, except for all those surplus Lokis. The standard weapons are Banshee cannons and Interceptor missiles. Even though there are plenty of Silent Threat weapons, there just aren't enough Hornets or Interceptors if you choose fighters other than the Loki. Try as you might, you can't get away from that "failed experiment in stealth technology." Not that you need to, but it is annoying nonetheless.

Design:
Not much...1/2 star is extremely generous. The ingredients here just don't make a good recipe: Toss a lot of ships into FRED, form them into 8 hostile and 4 friendly wings. Add 1 Lucifer that jumps out as the mission starts, and add a Hades and a wing of two GTC Leviathans. Set hostile wings to 500 waves with a 10 second delay. Don't bother giving anyone AI orders, let the default AI do the dirty work. Add in two events for messages. Don't bother with a debriefing at all. And set the only directive to "last 5 minutes" but tie it to an event that triggers at the START of the mission -- so that the objective is satisfied at the start. A primary objective to "have fun" will be satisfied when 360 seconds pass. Any wings in the game warp out after 361 seconds. <p> If mission design was that easy, every mission would be 5.0 stars and we wouldn't have to waste our time reviewing them. Alas, this is not so. All but TWO of the hostile wings have a departure cue set to 0 time elapsed. That's why this mission is so easy...71% of the Shivan fighters don't arrive at all! This is a horrendous bug or mistake on Designer's part. <p> Finally, 360 seconds is 6 minutes and not 5 minutes. Is this a mistake or a deliberate attempt to confuse the pilot? Not that it matters, this mission design is technically deficient in many ways.

Gameplay:
Naming a mission objective "have fun" doesn't make it fun at all. There isn't any dogfighting, since the Shivan fighters are slaughtered as they arrive. There isn't any target practice, as the targets are frequently destroyed right from underneath your crosshairs. And there aren't even 100 Shivans, due to a dreadful design flaw that causes most of the waves never to arrive. At least it doesn't crash, but that would only spare you from the horror. Myst was more fun than this.

Other Thoughts:
A mission so bad, it might be one of Ouroboro's nightmares come to life.