Description
Oversee the officer exchange from the main FS2 campaign (mission 2 from my Distant Earth campaign)

Storyline:
While basic, the premise of this mission serves its purpose well. It might have been nice to see some more backstory with a Command brief, as the briefing is rather short and doesnÂ’t go into any of the circumstances surrounding the meeting of capital ships. It also contains some grammatical errors, but the icons all match up nicely. In the mission the messages are thin on the ground other than to announce arrival and departure and so the atmosphere in the mission is virtually non-existent.

Balance:
If you lose this mission then you probably havenÂ’t progressed past the Amazon drone fighting stage of the path to Freespace glory. The initial Shivan wings that arrive are no match for all your firepower, and when the captured destroyer shows up the Happenstance will deal with it easily, totally failing your mission objectives, but more on that below. In fact, the only foreseeable way that you can lose is for the Shivan fighters launched from the GVD Tuten to kill you, which might happen, as their arrival is chaotic.

Design:
The design of this mission is really quite appalling. It actually acts to make the mission <i>less</i> fun, by giving you impossible goals and tedious tasks. For example, the Happenstance will destroy the Vasudan destroyer long before you can disable it, which leads to a failed primary goal you canÂ’t really complete. Even if you do nobody arrives to reclaim the destroyer anyway. As I said before, the distinct lack of messages detract from the atmosphere a great deal. Directives all work, as do beams, though there are no send-message-lists, which couldÂ’ve been used at least once, and no background either.

Gameplay:
This isnÂ’t a mission; itÂ’s a life sentence. IÂ’m sorry to be so harsh to an author, but rarely have I seen a mission make Freespace 2 so horribly <i>tedious</i>, with long lulls, especially when the transports transfer cargo and nothing to do or listen to in terms of messages. Even destroying the initial wings is so easy as to be yawn-full. And the entire mission takes twelve minutes. Yes, <i>twelve.</i> I was left wondering what IÂ’d achieved.

Other Thoughts:
If only there was more atmosphere and the opposition at the start was better, with less lulls and you get the picture. Could do better, I think. I'm not saying that there isn't the possibility of improvement in the mission - it just needs a lot of it.