Description
You and Alpha Flight Take On A Lost Flight of Dragon Class Ships In An Asteroid field.

Storyline:
Not much to it, but what storyline does exist is contradictory. No icons of asteroids exist to match your patrol "in the Beta 3 asteroid field." The Alpha wing icon is unknown, but the Shivan ship types are known...as well as where they will likely come out of "hyper space." Doesn't seem logical at all to jump right into an asteroid field. <p> Mechanically, the briefing doesn't cut it. The camera spin is poorly done and the ships icons are partially off-screen. And the "scorps" wing should at least be given a decent name. Misspellings and run-on sentences should be obvious when you only have three sentences to proofread!

Balance:
You must change the ship loadout. The ships combination selected automatically can only be described as strange: 1 Ulysses, 2 Apollos, and 1 Athena. And Alpha 1 will not be armed with the Shivan Mega Laser, which is an invalid weapon for Terran ships. Thankfully, there's plenty of Hercules to choose and the missile selection is adequate. <p> The Shivans seem to survive well in the asteroid field, but seemed to have been underarmed. Checking in FRED confirms a poor weapon selection: 1 Dragon is armed with <u>no</u> weapons, 2 Dragons are armed with training/light weapons, and 1 Dragon is armed with dual Heavy Lasers. The Scorpions are decently armed with Light/Heavy Shivan Lasers. Come on, be a sport. At least give the bad guys a fighting chance!

Design:
Goes from bad to worse. You jump inside edges of the asteroid field and the Shivans have already arrived to greet you. And they're right on top of you...literally...less than 50 meters! <p> Which is only the start of how horrible the ship placement is in Dragons. You start facing the wrong direction on the edge of the asteroid field, too close to your enemies, and your enemies are way too close to each other. Some of the Dragons start less than 10 meters away from each other! <p> Also suffers from your standard problems with timing waves. All the fighters jump in at the same time immediately after the prior one dies. A 5 to 7 second delay is NOT enough time at all.

Gameplay:
The only saving grace of this mission is that the Shivans are hard to kill. The Shivan AI works well in the asteroid field and avoids colissions. Volition did a great job with the asteroid explosions, which you'll see when your shots miss a Shivan fighter and take out the surrounding debris. <p> If you chase the Shivans out of the asteroids, however, you're toast. Why? Even though only a few Shivans can kill you quickly, the first wave will still take out your wingmen. The last two waves are spent playing "chase the Shivan off my tail" while six to eight Shivans gang up on lonely little Alpha 1. I guess it's fair since most of the Shivan Dragons are crippled, but it wouldn't have been that difficult to adjust all the Dragons to medium weapons and introduce smaller and smaller waves.

Other Thoughts:
I seriously doubt the designer even tried very hard.