Description
You must fight overwhelming odds in the most dangerous nebula ever discovered. Take on swarms of Shivans and tame the vast wilderness known as the Noxious Nebula.

Storyline:
The storyline of this campaign is pretty original and unlike that of any other that I have seen. The story pretty much goes like this: there is this star that has just gone into its white dwarf stage and is emitting a lot of gas and making a nebula filled with deuterium (a gas that powers a lot of the ships). This nebula just happens to be filled with a gas that is four times as powerful as the normal deuterium, so of course the GTVA wants to get it. That’s where the conflicts begin. The reason I gave this storyline a three is because I noticed a few conflicts with the Freespace universe. Also, there were quite a few grammatical and other errors in briefings and other times where story was shown. One such example that really started to bug me was that command kept calling the Shivans “Shivians” in the voiceovers.

Balance:
There were some things that were done well in the field of balance, but there were too many things done wrong so it was forced to get a bad score. The first thing that I noticed that was way bad in balance was that in every mission, you had the option of using every ship and every weapon (even dogfight versions). In several missions you had way too many friendly ships and you almost always overwhelmed the enemy forces.

Design:
There were many errors that I noticed in design. One error that happened in every instance was when you were guarding a ship and you had to escort it until it departed and when it departed it would display in the directives as red text, meaning that you failed it. Ship placement was not done very well in any of the missions either. I wasnÂ’t too impressed by the design.

Gameplay:
The campaign is still fun and poses a challenge despite some of the other areas that it lacks in. One thing that started to get on my nerves was that there was more than one mission in the short campaign that had too powerful of an EMP storm in the nebula. It kept knocking out your sensors, but compensated by the story line and the creation of a ship that dampened the EMP disruptions. This satisfied me after two grueling missions of gameplay in the nebula. Also, I found that the author seemed to use the same Shivan fighters over and over. He didnÂ’t use a variety of ships.

Other Thoughts:
ItÂ’s still worth checking out, and has both a sound and no-sound version. I played the sound version.