Star Wars: X-Wing vs Tie Fighter: Balance of Power Campaigns

Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter is a 1997 space combat simulator from Totally Games, the studio that defined the genre with the earlier X-Wing and TIE Fighter titles. The core premise is straightforward: you strap into an iconic Star Wars starfighter, manage power allocation between shields, engines, and lasers, and fight through either structured campaign missions or the multiplayer dogfighting the base game was built around. This Steam release bundles in the Balance of Power Campaigns expansion, which adds a proper single-player structure the original shipped without, covering Rebel and Imperial mission sets that give you a reason to keep launching sorties solo. From a sim-depth perspective, the decision-making loop here is tighter than it looks. Every engagement asks you to juggle energy management, target prioritization, and throttle control simultaneously. Do you dump power into shields and outlast the TIE swarm, or go full engines and stay mobile? It is not a modern sim in the Elite Dangerous sense, but the underlying system has real teeth. The campaign missions ramp up enemy count and objective complexity steadily, and the AI wingmen are functional rather than brilliant, which means you are never fully off the hook for protecting capital ships or suppressing bombers. The honest problem is that the multiplayer infrastructure, which was the entire original product pitch, is effectively dead through official channels. The Steam version does not ship with matchmaking or working online lobbies out of the box. Getting multiplayer running in 2024 requires third-party tools and some community legwork. If you are buying this expecting to queue into eight-player dogfights immediately, you will be disappointed. The Balance of Power campaign carries the purchase on its own reasonably well, but you are buying a single-player experience with a multiplayer skeleton. For newcomers to classic space sims, the tutorial is minimal by modern standards. Controls are dense, and the game does not hand-hold you through power management or the nuances of attack vectors. A few YouTube videos covering HOTAS-era space sim basics will save you significant frustration in the opening hours. Joystick support remains functional, and that is genuinely the recommended input method. Playing on mouse and keyboard works, but the analog precision of a stick makes the moment-to-moment flying considerably more satisfying. The mod ecosystem is thin compared to something like Freespace 2 Open, so do not factor community content expansion into your purchase reasoning. The 76 percent positive Steam rating with a mixed label reflects a real tension: fans who remember the multiplayer era rate it highly for nostalgia and historical significance, while newcomers encounter the infrastructure gap and an interface that has not aged gracefully. If you have already played the standalone TIE Fighter campaign, consider this a companion piece rather than an upgrade. If you have never touched 1990s Star Wars sims at all, the Balance of Power campaigns are a reasonable entry point into that era, just go in knowing the cockpit, not the menu system, is where the quality lives. Diego, Scout Team