Starlancer/YMMV

• Complete Monster: Ivan "The Butcher" Petrov and his brother Nicolai have more than a few war crimes under their belt, and Admiral Kulov is the bastard behind the entire Coalition, which regularly massacres whole population centers just to keep them in line.
• Crowning Moment of Awesome: Getting a perfect run on the final mission (Mission 24). Yes. It's that hard.
  • Hell, even on the easiest difficulty it can take 5 or 6 tries just to live through, much less manage One Hundred Percent Completion.
• That One Level: Starlancer has one of the highest densities of Scrappy Missions in gaming history—two out of three, at least, over the course of the game. Here's a summary of the 10-minute flight serving as the Act 1 Final Battle:
  • • Defend Fort Baxter from the enemy carrier Ramases (unsuccessfully; Plotline Death); defend Fort Baxter's lifepods from enemy attack. Use Q and Shift-Q to scroll through the list of friendly targets until you find the lifeboats, speed over to them, hit E for "nearest enemy", and then cross your fingers.
    • Defeat enemy Ace Pilot, who will panic-button retreat basically the instant a stray round wings him. Get chewed out by your CO if you don't One-Hit Kill him. (Never see him again, even though he's one of the best Coalition pilots and you're the best Alliance pilot and at least one of you should logically be gunning for the other.)
    • Disable Deflector Shields on the Ramases. Get the engines too unless you want it to panic-button retreat as well. (This ends the fight faster, obviously, but the game counts it as a mission failure.)
    • Defend allied torpedo bombers hitting the Ramases. Again, the "Target Next Friendly" button is your salvation here... Assuming you can find them before the baddies do.
    • Defeat all remaining fighters.
  • And that's just Mission #7. Get to #24 and things get really hairy.
    • That last mission is a full blown Scrappy Level: A good 20-30 minutes of relatively easy gameplay (IF you have the Shroud and IF Mouse doesn't forget to warn you the Ion Cannon is targeting you), followed by a hideous Escort Mission where you have to defend a couple of tiny ships you can barely find against a specific squad of enemies within the huge clusterfuck of a battle that is gunning for them. It's nearly impossible to see how many are left alive, but if afterwards not enough made it with their planted explosives, you fail the mission and have to do the whole 30 minute intro again for your next try. The real kicker: Even if you saved enough of them, the explosion still doesn't destroy the target, the game just doesn't fail the mission. This troper had little problems with the rest of the game, but never got passed that mission before giving up in frustration.