Star Wars: TIE Fighter

Star Wars: TIE Fighter flipped the perspective and put the player in an Imperial fighter, a craft without shields, without a hyperdrive, and with armor that can take only a few hits. It's precisely this fragility that changes the whole style of the game. While a Rebel pilot could withstand a strafing run and pull back, an Imperial pilot must dodge, attack from favorable angles, and rely on speed. As the campaigns progress, stronger craft are unlocked, from the TIE Bomber through the heavy TIE Advanced to models with shields, so the game smoothly transitions from pure survival to the role of an elite pilot with full equipment.

The missions are noticeably more varied than in the previous game. Besides combat, players inspect ships, hunt down pirates, escort diplomats, or secretly recruit crews, and alongside the main objectives come bonus and secret tasks that the player must discover on their own. The layer of orders from a secret Imperial order gives the whole campaign an unexpectedly interesting narrative framework, where the Empire isn't just a backdrop but an organization with its own politics. Technically the game improved the polygon engine, added more detailed models and more colorful environments, and again used dynamic music that underscores every turn of a mission.

At the time TIE Fighter was received as the pinnacle of the genre and still appears in rankings of the best space simulators of all time. It showed that a game can put the player on the side of the antagonist faction and still pull them in, because the missions make sense from the perspective of the character they're playing. Even today it's a surprisingly playable title: the controls are logical, the missions have a clearly readable structure, and the feeling of flying a craft that must not take a single hit is still remarkably tense. If today's player is to try only one DOS space sim, this is the safest choice. It helps that the game explains its systems gradually, so even a newcomer learns within a few missions to work with power management, shields, and wingman orders without having to study the whole manual.