YMMV / X-Wing Alliance

• Angst? What Angst?: The Alliance shows remarkably little urgency towards the Imperial ambush on Vergesso Base in the fourth campaign, during which you must rescue Aeron from said base. Even after her rescue Aeron is remarkably unfazed, even though the Empire had just laid waste to the Alliance fleet protecting the region, resulting in huge casualties for the Rebellion.
• Moment of Awesome: Several, including the Battle of Endor.
• Awesome Music: It's Star Wars. What were you expecting?
• Cult Classic: Gradually has found a stronger fandom among Star Wars loyalists in the years since its release, with multiple fanmade mods created to improve upon its flaws remaining in ongoing development today.
• Game-Breaker: Any ship with a turret, like the Falcon (or even the stock YT-1300), or especially the Otana. Skilled players found it comically easy to take out virtually any other ship in the game when flying ships with turrets.
• Goddamned Bats: The family missions are full of 'em.
• Moral Event Horizon: Uncle Antan's Face–Heel Turn by siding with the Empire and selling out the family.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The scream of the TIEs zooming past you.
• Obvious Beta: Nothing too serious, although there is a general lack of polish and some rough edges. For instance, the cutscenes suffer from visibly primitive 3D graphics and an obvious de-synch between the characters' dialogue and mouth movements.
  • An especially notorious gameplay bug takes place in the second mission of the fourth campaign, when you and your wingman are sent to inspect a massive Imperial convoy bound for the Death Star. Oftentimes, one enemy freighter will randomly explode upon arrival, causing you to fail the mission. Several fanmade patches to address this have emerged.
  • The final mission of the fifth campaign sees your allies race to the rescue of several captured freighters being held captive by a treacherous pirate clan. Some of these craft will not hyper to safety after the fact, and instead remain parked in place.
  • In the fifth mission of the first Alliance campaign, you're tasked with retrieving a probe for Aeron and are about to pass through a civilian customs station that comes under attack by pirates. An intervening gunship on the scene will actually crash into the space station during the chaos for no apparent reason.
  • Several e-mails arrive in Ace's computer slightly sooner than they're supposed to, according to the chronology of the plot. For the most part this is fine, but occasionally this spoils the Plot Twist for the next mission. For example, Emon will contact Ace to express his anger at the fact that mercenaries have taken over the Azzameens' Home Base, right before the mission where Ace and Aeron discover that the mercenaries have done so.
• One-Scene Wonder: A non-human case; an astonishing number of the various spacecraft seen in game's ship database tend to make no more than one appearance in the entirety of the campaign, with a surprising number of them not even showing up in-game at all; given the game's Obvious Beta status, it's likely that many of these craft in question were intended to appear in battle at one point or another, but that the final product ultimately was not able to make room for them all.
• The Scrappy: Many feel the family that makes up the game's main focus is this. Uncle Antan might as well take the cake for not only being an utter Jerkass towards his siblings to begin with but also for selling out the family to the Empire simply because his brother Tomaas' dealings with the Rebel Alliance would ruin the family's business, and managing to escape death/capture as well as getting away with his actions.
• So Okay, It's Average: Seems to be the all-around consensus towards the game, particularly upon its initial release, with it being seen as a step down from its critically-acclaimed predecessors X-Wing and TIE Fighter, but a decent Space Sim in its own right.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • The cutscenes are a far cry from those of the game's predecessors despite (or due to) being rendered in full 3D; especially glaring is the reused and underdeveloped human models seen, particularly of the Imperial officers, with their dialogue and mouth movements failing to match up.
  • In the final mission of Endor, when you flee the Death Star shaft the backdrop of Endor and the retreating Rebel fleet is clearly just a low res 2D backdrop that you can actually crash into via glitch. It's especially unfortunate given the otherwise decently rendered backdrops seen throughout the campaigns.
• Tearjerker: The deaths of Tomaas and Galin, a tragedy that leaves the Azzameen family on the run and at the mercy of the Empire when they move in to seize the family's assets.
  • Before this game's release, the Liberty was just another Rebel cruiser that happened to be the first unfortunate victim of the Death Star's superlaser in the movie. Here, you are one of its pilots and it is your home base for the majority of the campaign. This is sure to make its destruction in the final battle at Endor a much more bitter pill to swallow.
• Vindicated by History: The game was initially met with a lukewarm reception in 1999; The campaign was seen as inferior to TIE Fighter, multiplayer suffered from issues that X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter didn't, and critics felt the game was graphically dated. When Freespace 2 released later in the same year to wide acclaim for its mission design and graphical power, Alliance was completely overshadowed. But fans have been much kinder to Alliance over recent years. It proved to be one of the last major space sim games before the genre went dormant on PC for over a decade until Elite Dangerous finally exited Development Hell, with Lucasarts abandoning the X-Wing series in favor of the console-friendly Rogue Squadron. The rerelease of Alliance along with the rest of the series on Steam and GOG in 2015 was warmly welcomed by Star Wars and space sims fans alike.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Played with; the game was criticized for its dated graphics despite being released in 1999, where it boasted actual textures and detailed backgrounds all around. Several fan mods however, most notably X-Wing Alliance Upgrade, have helped to make it more deserving of this trope.

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