The guide begins by covering ships and weapons. The ships section is fairly useless if you have half a brain, but the weapons section is, in my opinion, the most helpful section in the book. The instruction manual included with the game is pretty sketchy on how and when to use your weapons and doesn’t really give you a good idea of some of the alternative functions that each weapon has. This section of the strategy guide was nicely detailed and gives the player an idea of what the energy costs of using this weapon will be and when it would be most effective. I thought that this section was pretty invaluable for this reason. A person could figure this information out on his or her own, but it takes quite a bit of trial and error to accomplish that, and sometimes, it’s just nice to be able to whip out the old strategy guide. Finishing off this section is a list of the hidden weapons available in specific levels and a list of the five extra secret missions you can get by performing special tasks.

The rest of the book is organized by mission, starting with the sixteen major missions of the campaign mode and ending with the five dual missions. Each section contains screen shots that are mostly impossible to make out and a step-by-step list of things that will happen and what you should do when they occur. I immediately cringe at this kind of hand-holding, but I suppose if you’re stuck this would solve your problems nicely. But it also takes some of the fun out of the whole "I figured this out for myself" thing. The only exceptions I would make to this are the occasional missions where it becomes difficult to understand exactly how a mission objective is completed. There were several that were tricky, and I just happened to stumble upon the "correct" way to proceed. Neither the game nor its manual was any help in clarifying things for me, and it would have been nice to just open up the guide and have it tell me exactly how the game wanted me to accomplish my objective.