YMMV / X-Wing

• Demonic Spiders:
  • Those damned Assault Gunboats, unlike TIE Fighters and their variants, Assault Gunboats have shields, anti-starfighter missiles and are equipped with a hyperdrive meaning they can jump in and out of the battlefield at any moment.
  • Late in the game, the TIE Advanced, which is the same type of craft Vader piloted on A New Hope, not only is it faster than the A-Wing and more maneuverable than the TIE Interceptor, but they're also shielded which makes a it royal pain in the ass to try to take them out. Fortunately they're much rarer than other enemies.
  • Not to mention the Nebulon-B Escort Frigate, especially in the original X-Wing when you can't take out the guns (of which she has a lot). She has no blind spots and a very large volume of fire. Many players feared the arrival of an Escort Frigate more than seeing a freakin' Star Destroyer.
  • You wouldn't think Lambda class shuttles (think the stolen Tydirium from Return of the Jedi) would be a threat against a snubfighter. Provided you don't come across them in the training missions, Mission Ten of Tour of Duty 1 puts the lie to that real quick; in X-Wing Lambda-class shuttles feature quad lasers and stronger shields than the average starfighter.
• Goddamn Bats: Goddamn TIE Fighters/TIE Interceptors/TIE Bombers.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: X-Wing was the first Star Wars game ever made by LucasArts, as late as 1993, after the company got the rights back from Brøderbund Software. Only years later, the company would be critizised for not making anything else and had to undergo a strategic shift that never quite succeeded.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The face of the medical droid. The Unnaturally Blue Lighting makes it worse.
  • In one of Tour IV's cutscenes, Darth Vader shows up to execute Overlord Ghorin. This by itself wouldn't be so bad, since the death happens off-screen, but the aftermath—Ghorin's servant droids continuing to fan his corpse despite them having no reason to, while the background music fades out with a Last Note Nightmare, can send chills up the spines of younger players.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: One of the best Star Wars related products in its day, with cinematics only below the ones from Rebel Assault, that was CD-ROM based and not a 3" 1/2 like X-Wing, and, unlike the aforementioned Rebel Assault, actually having gameplay that rivaled some of the best flight sims of the time, instead of being a very barebones and amateurishly-done arcade game.
• That One Level:
  • The infamous Redemption Run is both of these, with enemies coming from two sides, your wingmen not responding to your commands, and a single tiny mistake meaning failure. It's basically impossible to find a working solution for the mission without hours of Trial-and-Error Gameplay. Its hardness became an Ascended Meme in the X-Wing Series novel Rogue Squadron by Michael Stackpole, where the "Redemption Scenario" (dubbed "Requiem Scenario" by the pilots), based on the mission, is an infamously hard Virtual Training Simulation used by the New Republic Starfighter Command.
  • Other notable offenders are the eighth and tenth missions of the first tour of duty. The former has you identifying which transports have rebel prisoners in need of rescue while you're being pursued by TIE fighters, on an extremely tight time limit. The latter is exactly the same, except this time you're identifying Lambda class shuttles, and unlike transports, they'll shoot back. It doesn't help that both missions put you in the very slow Y-Wing. It's been joked that in the former mission that you'll see more of Sullust's moon, Sulon, than you will in Jedi Knight, which has over half the game set on that moon.

---