Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter

Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter brought a marked shift toward multiplayer and battles between live players to the popular series of Star Wars space simulators. Unlike previous installments, which focused on elaborate singleplayer campaigns for either the Republic or the Empire, this title placed multiplayer battles over a network at the center of attention, where each player could choose the side of the Republic with X-wings and A-wings or the Empire with TIE fighters and bombers, and face off in clearly designed missions.

The game retained an emphasis on simulator-style ship handling, energy management between weapons, shields and engines, and the tactical use of terrain and formations, only this time in cooperative and competitive missions designed specifically for multiple players at once. The graphics and ship models were detailed for their time, and on Windows 9x computers the game benefited from what was then still relatively new support for online and local network play, which for many players was their first serious experience of online space battles set in the Star Wars universe and of coordinating entire squadrons against an opponent.

The absence of a substantial singleplayer campaign at launch drew criticism from part of the player base, which was later addressed by the Balance of Power expansion, adding dozens of new missions and a story framework. Even so, thanks to its multiplayer focus the game earned a firm place in the history of the series and is still cited today as an important stepping stone between the classic X-Wing titles and the later, more expansive X-Wing Alliance, which combined multiplayer and singleplayer into a single whole. For players on Windows 9x at the time, it also represented one of the first genuinely accessible ways to play large-scale aerial battles set directly in the Star Wars universe over a network, even before online play became a matter of course in the space simulator genre.

Why play it: For players interested in multiplayer space battles in the Star Wars universe and in what one of the first accessible ways to play over a network on Windows 9x looked like.