Description
Second mission in the 'Shades of Gray' campaign. This mission follows immediately after 'Crossing the Line' lower on ths mission list. It is highly recommended that you play that mission before playing this one for storyline purposes.

Storyline:
Carrying on where the excellent 'Crossing the Line' left off, Bad Karma's storyline involves capturing a renegade Vasudan transport. The briefing is good – all the icons match up, though there are a couple of spelling errors. The debriefing and in-flight messages are also excellent, though once again, there are a few spelling errors. The messages in the mission were well executed – I even felt sorry for Epsilon wing as they were quite endearing so I just disabled them. I have a feeling that this was too humanitarian.

Balance:
While almost everything else in the mission is great, the balance is quite a long way off. It's very hard to save the capture vessel, the GTT Omega, from simultaneous attack by 8 GTVA fighters, especially when they're so fast and at the same AI level as your wingmen, which is a problem I have with the mission. If they weren't armed so heavily, or you were better able to intercept them, it'd help a lot.

Design:
The design of this mission is excellent. The ships are positioned using all three axes and all of the waypoint paths and directives work. Send-message-lists are used for some of the messages, but not all – it should be noted by anyone using send-message-lists that they can be chained, you just have to put a delay equal to that of all of the message delays combined. There are also lots of orders, which work fine, and the background is good-looking. The use of Alt-names for the Chronos is a nice touch for FS1 veterans, and the naming of the civilian ships is good, and also quite amusing (<i>Baranec's Pride</i>, anyone?)

Gameplay:
The feel of being in a high traffic civilian area really is excellent, and flying among would be great. However, you do have a mission to do, and so you'll have to chase down the Vasudan transport and disable it. The main problem with the mission is that it's so difficult to save the puny Elysium, and this quickly becomes frustrating. No matter how violent I was with the GTVA fighters and clever with ordering wingmen, one or two fighters got through, and – boom! End of mission.

Other Thoughts:
I see great things for this campaign in the future. And my spies tell me so too. As another aside, as I was putting in this review, the review poster went all screwy. Hmmm.