Description
Welcome to the boonies pilot. This is actually a relatively minor mission that is scene one leading up to the more involved Bait and Switch posted nearby. These two will eventually be the first two missions in a seven to ten mission campaign. However, before I charge into it, I would like some feedback on these two.

There's lots of sound with these ones, which are critical to the mission. They may not work without them.

Storyline:
Brilliant! The funny (but not out of place) opening dialogue between the pilots in this mission is one of the best I've ever seen in the Freespace world. And they are cued to interrupt each other as well. Not only this, but the Command Briefing is very well-written (with the exception of a couple typos) and the Briefing and Debriefings themselves are also excellent. Voice work is also great, as each pilot seems to have a distinct personality. The only flaw in the voices is on Stage 3 or 4 of the briefing, I think, where it goes faint.

Balance:
It's not the most complex gameplay ever witnessed in a Freespace mission, but I like how it works. Essentially, you must destroy a couple freighters before they depart. The problem? They are about 10 kilos from each other. You'll have to think about how to destroy both - since destroying one is the easy part. I often like seeing such objectives in missions - the easy way to beat it, and the more challenging way.

Design:
Well, the gameplay is nice - but the design is missing some crucial elements. For starters, the messages totally die off after the initial conversation and one or two thereafter. There is no message about the freighters being destroyed or departing, no message to return to base even. I found these two aspects rather hard to swallow actually, since they are so simple to implement.

The other thing is that the designer could have cut back on the number of events by using the send-message-list s-exp. It's not an easy s-exp to understand, though.

Gameplay:
Pretty good - as I said, destroying one freighter is one thing. Destroying both is the trick.

Other Thoughts:
There's a nasty problem I noticed with the Poseidon being a "ghost." You could shoot right through it. The game wouldn't detect collision until I shot the cargo container beneath it a few times. I think that this might be linked to the asteroid field in the background of the mission - as such behavior goes hand-in-hand with asteroid fields.