Description
You are to patrol the new Endeavor Station in Vasuda Prime. The station is awaiting supplies from the PVFR Desert Fox and the PVC Aegeas, but something goes horribly wrong.

Storyline:
The Endeavor station is expecting a shipment of unspecified cargo. The Aegeas will dock with the Desert Fox (There's a Vasudan ship called the Desert Fox?) and will then "prepare" the cargo before giving it back to the Fox. Yeah, I was plenty confused too. And since the Fox and Aegeas both turn out to be HoL ships (Are there EVER friendly Vasudans in these missions?), we'll never know what the hell the author was talking about. The in-game plot is just as stupid and confusing. As I'll outline in the Design section, the events which took place were totally unexplained and included nearly every overdone cliche in the history of FRED.

Balance:
Let's see. On easy, I beat this mission hands-down. On medium, I didn't get past the arrival and subsequent "hey, it's not really friendly!" status of the Aegeas. The player (for no apparent reason) isn't permitted to alter his loadout from the default four Apollos with dual Prometheus cannon, a pack of Interceptors, and a rack of Hornets. On medium and higher skill, this is simply not enough to defend the station! A wing of Zeuses is added upon the arrival of the Demon, but they only pack Tsunamis, which take forever to wear down a Destroyer.

Design:
I've said it before and I'll say it again: UGH. Now that that's out of the way, on to the specifics - I think a description of my experience would be in order here. The mission begins with the arrival of two Cains - one tries to ram the station (cliche 1) while the other just sits around without moving. After dealing with the bull-wannabe, I didn't have enough time to take out the other Cain before the Fox and Aegeas arrived. Command asked me to scan the Aegeas, at which point I realized that of course the Aegeas would be from the HoL, and not friendly at all. I was right (cliche 2). Anticipating this, and on a hunch that the author wouldn't have been thorough enough to check, I tried bringing up the newly arrived wing of Horuses (the Aegeas' escort) on my comm menu. Sure enough, just before i scanned the Aegeas and found out that it was evil, I was able to order the enemy wing to Depart. There's a bug for you. The mission continues with a few wings of fighters attacking the station (and being totally ineffective), a Demond arriving and taking forever to die, and the departure of the station's escape pod... an Elysium transport. Now, the secondary objective - from the start of the mission - had been to "protect the escape pod if neccesary", so I was expecting this, even though it didn't pop up on my Escort list. But the station was at 80 percent hull! I had my answer later - an Unknown Isis entered the arena and approached the station. Command ordered me to not open fire - fine with me, since I was trying to figure out what was going on with the Mephisto transport that rammed the station to almost no effect a few minutes ago (another cliche, though authors usually have the sense to make their kamakazes DO something). Was I asked to scan the Isis? No! I just let it fly into the station's docking bay totally unscanned and unmolested. Then, lo and behold, "The station's about to blow!" Yep, Command must be psychic to know to evacuate the base a couple of minutes before the threat to it even arrives. The station spontaniously, at 80 percent hull and without any real reason, blew up. (Perhaps the most overdone cliche there is) I think, by now, that my problems with this are clear: The mission makes no sense in any way and was amazingly confusing. Oh yeah - and the entire crew of an Arcadia station, apparently, can fit onto a single Elysium. Wow.

Gameplay:
I'm not sure there's anything to really say here. I was simply so confused and annoyed at the constant cliches and bad design that on easy it was a cakewalk, while three tries were needed to finish the mission on medium. It simply isn't fun.

Other Thoughts:
I didn't know that three or four separate cliches could be jammed into a single mission like this!