Description
Attack the Hammer of Light command ship as it should be.

Storyline:
Command has found the Hammer of Light's command ship, the PVD Hammer, in the Wolf 359 system. It is protected by three wings of fighters and two Aten cruisers. Blow them all up. Not the deepest plot, and it doesn't exactly correspond to the Freespace universe, since the HoL flagship was the PVD Anvil, and it was located in Altair, which is all the way over on the other side of the starmap. <p> The Briefing itself is sub-par: the grid gets at some funny and disorienting angles, and all three enemy wings are strangely marked friendly. There's excessive highlighting and some icon overlapping as well. At least they all have the right models. <p> But keep in mind that this mission was made more for fun than for story. Make no mistake, this is a straight-up bombing run.

Balance:
Major points lost here for an all-too-common error: the dreaded 5-of-everything syndrome. You've got five of every missile, which is far too little to supply even half a ship. It only exacerbates matters that the default loadout of your allied bombers includes only one Tsunami. Only one. It is impossible to equip all of your bombers with bombs. <p> Your ship loadout only offers you a choice of Apollos, Valkyries, and Ulysses. You are not offered any other bombers aside form the default three Medusas which comprise Beta wing, even though you are given 5 Harbingers, which only Ursas can carry. There's no rhyme or reason for why your choices are so limited, and for a mission that is clearly made simply for the enjoyment of blowing up big capital ships, such limits are unacceptable. <p> Once you strap in your fighter and take off, the initial fighter wings come on too fast and furious. You'll be lucky if you can get your wings to survive through the first minute. Once that is over, however, the enemy population drops significantly. The rest of the mission then consists of firing into the belly of the remaining cap ships, not protecting your bombers. Assuming, of course, that any bombers made it through. <p> And finally, let me ask you this: do you know how long it takes to destroy a Typhon with Tsunamis?!

Design:
The first thing you see is that there are 5 secondary objectives, and three of them are to destroy a fighter wing. This is excessive; if you insist on making destroying the fighters an objective, they should be grouped together into a "destroy all fighters" objective. Anyway, one of the objectives doesn't even work properly, because its sexps specify that all the ships in the first wing must be destroyed, instead of the entire wing. However, the corresponding directive doesn't suffer from this problem. <p> There are a couple of nice touches, though. The Atens slowly revolve around the Typhon, although they do so on only one axis. It would have looked nicer if everything weren't on the XZ plane. Also on positioning, the starting wings are too close together when they enter the mission, which can lead to some odd collisions. Messages are included for appropriate events, but they don't all work properly.

Gameplay:
This mission is still enjoyable...for the first time, anyway. After that, the flaws become unavoidable and ungainly. The limited loadout only adds to its lack of replayability. Still, that first time you load it up, punch through that wall of approaching fighters with a well-timed synaptic, and slam on the afterburner for a high-speed strafe of the PVD Hammer, it's a blast. <p> I only wish Telepath had taken more time to tweak things to perfection, and then this mission would have taken a place right next to Vasudan Gauntlet for quick and mindless entertainment.

Other Thoughts:
Another mission with unfulfilled potential. This is getting very frustrating, you know...