Tie Fighter starts you off with a nice easy mission flying a Tie Fighter, the levels soon progress and your skills develop as you meet new enemies and get to fly new craft. All the normal ships are there along with a few surprises for you to fly.

The game is very similar in concept to X-Wing and if you mastered that game you should have no problem moving over to Tie Fighter. Newcomers might find the large numbers of keys to use overwhelming.

Tie Fighter features some new aids to help fly your ship. You can now match your speed to that of you enemy by pressing Enter. This helps enormously when you are dog fighting. A new 'weapon' makes an appearance in Tie Fighter. The 'beam weapon', this is basically a tractor beam which stops your enemy from flying when he is in your view. I didn't find this particularly useful except on a few mission where it was vital.

Tie Fighter (Collectors CD and later) sports a wondrous SVGA (640*480) graphics mode. If your computer is fast enough the graphics are quite impressive (for the time).

Tie Fighter is now available in a double pack with X-Wing on Virgin White Label, it is also in the X-Wing Collectors Series. I'd recommend this game to anybody especially to people who have been put off by X-Wing Vs Tie Fighter because of its poor single player game.

You need at least a 486 or preferably a Pentium to get the most out of the game. The game runs fine under Win95 if you have enough memory.