Description
GTVA must evacuate all known systems quickly: the destruction of the Capella's jump nodes didn't stop the Shivans. Humans and vasudans must reach a rencently found Knossos Portal to get out known space and a last convoy remain behind. You have to help those people fleeing the system safely. <p> With this update, there is now more backgrounds, more enemies, a better storyline and MUCH more than 45 minutes of action...! For Aces only.

Storyline:
Due to some bizarre ‘Franglais’, the storyline of his mission loses the, well, plot somewhat. Sentences frequently fail to make any sense at all. The actual story isn’t too bad, although it isn’t great either, and some of the details in the briefing are faintly ludicrous – I mean, 50,000 people in one Argo transport? Apart from that, not all of the briefing icons and ships match up. Sometimes not even the labels do; for example, the Knossos is labelled as Alpha 4. During the mission there are quite a few messages, but most of these are to do with the status of ships, not radio chatter, which would have helped to break this 40 minute long mission up a bit.

Balance:
Mainly due to the length of the mission youÂ’ll have great difficulty completing it, though the structure of the goals doesnÂ’t help either. There are some nice ideas, such as a special bomber unit to destroy the beam cannons of the Sathanas. However, there are too many bombers over the huge time span to fight off effectively, particularly towards the end.

Design:
Well, this mission is certainly huge, and just placing ships and suchlike must have been a mammoth task. However, as the s-exps go, itÂ’s not all that complicated. In particular, send-message-lists, which would have been very useful in this mission, are absent. There are no directives and thereÂ’s no background either. On the plus side, there are some very intricate waypoint paths and everything thatÂ’s in the mission works fine. There could have been a lot more done, though.

Gameplay:
If youÂ’ve got the time to play it, this mission is fairly engaging, though some lulls in the action without messages to cover them make for boring patches. It can also get pretty tedious shooting down wing after wing of bombers if youÂ’re not careful. That said, there is usually quite a bit to see during the mission. The most annoying aspect of the mission is the way it suddenly gets hard at the end and all of your transports die after 35 minutes nursemaiding them. That'll teach me.

Other Thoughts:
This mission could be quite good if only it were slightly better put together.