A lot of great gameplay here, though it should have been more.
I say "almost all", because the game's biggest weakness is that the story falls apart near the end. I'm not sure what they were thinking, but I'm guessing it was something like this: that they had a great story planned similar to X-Wing's, the original game. In that game you basically flew as part of the Alliance's fighter force, and eventually were caught up in the death star battle which culminated the first movie, and got to fly through the trench like Luke Skywalker did and blow up the death star. It all tied together nicely and was very fulfilling.
You'd think that would be the goal of X-Wing Alliance too, that you would deal with the death star in the third movie much the same way, a great story culminating in exhilarating victory.
Not so. My guess is that someone higher up the chain at Lucas Arts said, no, you can't do that, because that's not exactly what happened in the movie. As a result the ending of the game just falls apart. Sure you get to blow up the death star, but by that time you are so confused about what happened to the story, that you're not sure if any of it makes any difference. It's goofy, and it destroys what should have been the best game of the series.
I may be wrong about why this game got messed up, but the end result is that it IS messed up. Too bad, because the game is a lot of fun up until that point. And it's still fun to blow up the death star even after that. It's just so much of a non-sequitur!
There's a few bugs in the game too, that they never bothered to fix, unlike the earlier games. So...really good game, but falls short of expectations which were raised by the earlier games. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!