There's a bit of strategy to accompany the heated warfare. You can give orders to your wingman, or to your entire squadron, assigning attack orders, requesting support, or beckoning them to fly in formation before mounting an assault. The AI does a pretty good job of taking orders, and their assistance comes in handy during a few of the more challenging missions. It's also nice that you're able to head back to repair and restock on ammo during most missions by simply flying within the vicinity of a friendly carrier, although you'll be forced to do this a few too many times during your missions. It can easily disrupt the flow of your battles, and take you away from the fun you're having.
What Does This Button Do?
It's great that there are so many controls and options available to you, but there are some situations where you simply can't hit all the buttons you'd like at any given moment. We found it difficult to use the padlock function to keep an enemy sighted while also controlling our aim, charging up a power attack, and so on. The controls could have probably been refined a bit so that it wasn't so difficult to access multiple combat options at once.
The mission structure also has issues. Each mission has a set of primary objectives as well as a set of secondary objectives. What these objectives are you never find out until the mission is complete, and then only if you've accomplished them. This makes it very difficult to try and complete everything a mission has to offer. This is especially frustrating due to the arbitrary time limit enforced during each mission. You'll often get the signal that you only have three minutes left to fight, and for some unexplained reason, if you don't get your primary objectives down by this time, the game is over. It's a disappointing way to ruin the fun you may have been having shooting down enemy fighters, when you have to race against the clock to take down some more space mines or other boring targets. A better system to indicate potential objective targets would have been a godsend.
The cinematic sequences tell a story that is predictable to say the least, with cardboard characters that don't really convey as much emotion as we've seen from Square's best cinematic efforts. Some of the voice work comes off well, but it's all ultimately forgettable, and you won't miss much if you skip past the interludes. The game itself is far more entertaining than these sequences, thanks to characters that seem almost like poorly conceived Final Fantasy characters in space suits. Expect lots of androgynous males with feathered hair, and fan service in the form of gratuitous cleavage shots and the occasional peek up a space skirt.
With no multiplayer (which is a darned shame) and a relatively short but challenging campaign, it's understandable why this game was released at a reduced forty dollar price point. You get your money's worth, especially if you like easy Achievement points, and strictly as a space shooter, the game delivers. There's just not a lot of meat here, and after a single playthrough, you'll probably be ready to move on to the next big adventure.
