Description
The first mission in a story driven campaign set during the final days of the second war with the Shivans. An original storyline takes us to the Belsienne nebula of the Altair system, where a secret GTVA research base, the GTI Tershaw, works furiously to create new and better designs for the officers and soldiers of the fleet. Hidden deep in the hellish nebula with its location patrolled by three AWACS cruisers, Tershaw has not recorded a singal contact in its twenty-nine year existance. At 1450 hours, contact was lost with the GTA Watchdog.

Storyline:
The storyline to this mission, which takes place near a top-secret research facility, is actually quite good. The command briefing and brief set the scene well; (even though the command brief could’ve been condensed down – one-line stages are a real pet peeve of mine) giving the mission the feel that you are isolated and that you know everybody around. This may just be my twisted mind, however. Feel free to ignore everything I’ve said here if you like. The briefing contains several spelling errors and the icons don’t match their ships, but the layout is nice. The best part of the mission’s storyline is the build-up at the beginning, which continues for five minutes with a colossal number of messages. Remember people, chatter is good, and there is some action for all you explosion fetishists too – you just have to wait a bit.

Balance:
This mission will have you diving through the fog to intercept loads of fighters once they arrive. Curiously you feel strangely invulnerable as you attack, because the Pegasus is rarely shot at, so your main priority becomes preservation of your mission critical craft, which isnÂ’t easy, but it isnÂ’t too hard either. YouÂ’ll probably be doing a lot of bomber interception and a little dogfighting too. The inclusion of Dragons is a bit of a mistake as itÂ’s hard enough to hit any fighter in a nebula without having them that fast. Similarly, the Cain cruiser in the mission is a tough nut for the limited GTVA forces to crack, but also poses no particular threat to your AWACS vessel or freighter.

Design:
The design of the mission lets it down quite a bit, as there are a few minor problems with it. First of all it all takes place on the XZ axis. You don’t notice this in the cloudy nebula as much as you would in a mission set in normal space, but its still a little annoying. The Shivan fighters and bombers are also all oriented in only one direction – tsk. There aren’t any directives at all (though to be honest they don’t show up very well against the nebula backgrounds anyway). The message layout has to be the most convoluted I’ve <i>ever</i> seen. They’re not in a list; they’re not even chained and don’t use ‘is-event-true’ either. No, all the messages are based on times after arrival or completion of waypoints and so on. If these were condensed down there’d be about one-third as many.

Gameplay:
The great isolated, creepy atmosphere of this mission that is built up in the first five minutes is partially ruined by the arrival of so many Shivans. ItÂ’s also doubly annoying when you consider that itÂ’s actually very hard to hit things the size of fighters in nebulae (BlueFlames gave me a reasonable enough explanation relating to framerate drop-offs). The mission is a bit of a long haul due to the time that the transport and freighter take to do their things, and the fact that the Pegasus is a feeble attack vessel, even when everyone ignores it, as they usually do.

Other Thoughts:
A nice intro to a promising campaign, despite flaws. Just let’s not have <i>all</i> the missions set in a nebula, eh? I’d really like to give this mission a 4 or higher, but I can’t with a little update though, I’d be happy to.