Star Wars: Squadrons

While Star Wars Squadrons does come with a more traditional story mode, there is no denying that multiplayer is the main event. It is a game that truly highlights the possibility of emergent narrative in online games, a form of storytelling that is genuinely unique to the medium.

This is never more evident than when you first load into a multiplayer game. Loading into a mission briefing to see your fellow pilots preparing for the upcoming pilot does a lot to set the tone for what's to come. These are the only people on which you will be able to rely on once the hangar doors open. Besides your talents as a pilot, they are the only ones that can save you once those hangar doors open. Even when the lobby is silent, Squadrons manages to set a perfectly tense tone.

Flying into your first battle is magnificently terrifying. From the inside of the cockpit, you're reminded that you're just a tiny little guy in a big hunk of junk, flying through space at extreme speeds. Trying to remember all the controls while enemies are swarming around you, lasers flying everywhere, explosions going off, is no easy feat. This is what makes Squadrons great. Trying to hold it together enough to survive, let alone carry out a mission, with the fear of letting the team down can be exhausting, but that's not a bad thing. Knowing that there is a squad of erratically behaving enemies out to get you only emphasizes this further.

Sure, the Skywalkers and Damerons of the world could take out entire squads without breaking a sweat. But that's not the fantasy that Squadrons wants to fulfill. You're the pilot who drew the fire away from Luke, the one who sacrificed themselves to make sure that the cruiser could warp to safety.

It's nice to see a game use mechanical clunkiness to translate the dichotomy of the vastness of space and the claustrophobia of an X-wing cockpit. Squadrons rules.

Star Wars: Squadrons is a very mixed bag and you should be very aware of what you want from this game before you buy it.

Squadrons obviously leans very heavily on the old Rogue Squadron and X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter games. You take the side of either Rebels or Imperials and fight it out in single- or multiplayer. I will comment on each separately.

From a technical standpoint this game is great. It looks amazing and runs fine on my older PC (GTX1060) in 1080p and controls fine with a controller. I can't comment on the problems people were having with VR or flight stick setups. You should be aware that this game is not a "simulator" game. You can control thrust, roll and steer, divert power to shields, engine and weapons and even control your front/back shield, but still this game does not have the complexity or depth that you would expect from a simulator. This game is Rogue Squadron with some additional mechanics.

Singleplayer
The game's story takes place after Episode 6. The rebels are trying to build some kind of super-battleship, and the Imperials are trying to stop that. You switch between Rebels and Imperials every few missions. The game tries to put some character to your superiors and squadmates, but sadly it fails massively in that regard. Everyone talks like they had a speech prepared days in advance and most interactions are just the characters dumping information about themselves. I wish game writers would understand that real people don't talk like this...

The missions are about what you would expect, it's basically destroy X, defend Y, shoot down fighters/bombers, you get the idea. Compared to the Rogue Squadron games it's really missing variety, you're just always in space fighting the same enemies.

The campaign is pretty short and takes only about 8 hours to finish. You can replay at higher difficulties or to earn medals (e.g. for finishing quickly or not dying), but it doesn't give you any real reward. Overall, the singleplayer is OK, but if you're buying this purely for the campaign, you will probably be disappointed.

Multiplayer
The game has 2 (two) 5v5 multiplayer modes. You have a choice between 5 ships, an allrounder (X-Wing/TIE), an interceptor (A-Wing/TIE-Interceptor), a bomber (Y-Wing/TIE-Bomber), a support ship (U-Wing/TIE-Reaper), and two special ships (B-Wing/TIE-Defender).

The first mode is Dogfight, which is Team Deathmatch, and plain awful. In principle it's pretty fun to chase your enemy around asteroids or space stations, but in practice this doesn't happen and fights just devolve into small chaotic clusters and the one who shoots faster in a head-on wins. If you've ever played War Thunder Arcade Mode, you know what I'm talking about.

The second, main mode is Fleet Battles. You try to destroy the other team's capital ship in back-and-forth assaults. This is a much better experience as with actual objectives the ships can play to their strengths and you can have much more varied gameplay.

As for progression, you gain unlock points by leveling up, and everything is unlockable from the start, so you can immediately start setting up your ships as you want. This means that higher-level players don't have that much of an advantage. There are no microtransactions and tons of cosmetics for your ship and cockpit that you can grind for if that's your thing.

However, this is it. Two modes, five ships each and a handful of maps. I haven't played much yet, but I can imagine that this might get old sooner or later. I can't really comment much on game balance yet, but in my limited experience the Rebels seem to win most of the time. Whether this is because they have some advantage or whether my teammates are just too stupid to find the Rebel flagship's shield generators, I'm not sure yet...

Overall, this is a game with limitations, but if you like Star Wars and are fine with arcade-y space shooters, you might like it.

Surprisingly, EA made a lower-budget Star Wars game without any micro-transactions. The game has a small scope compared to a game like Battlefield, with the gameplay focusing on dog fights in space.

The main campaign took me around 10 hours, but higher skilled players would complete this game quicker. A glitch prevented me from finishing one mission; I was just battling endless waves of Tie-Fighters. Restarting from check-point just had the same issue, so I had to restart from the beginning. The second attempt allowed me to complete that mission.

In the campaign you switch between the Rebel Alliance and the Empire. Throughout the campaign, you are introduced to the mechanics of the game and get to try each of the ships; so it’s essentially a large tutorial for the multiplayer.

The missions are basically as you would expect. You follow your team members whilst they talk, you defend certain ships, have to attack certain flagships, destroy waves of enemies.

When the mission is complete, you are awarded medals. There’s ones for completing it without dying, completing in a certain time, completing the optional objects and more. Aside from that, I wouldn’t say there is much replay value to the campaign.

In between missions, you can click on your team members in the space station to engage in dialog. You are a silent protagonist though, so you just listen to their dialog. I often thought you were positioned too close when talking, but it also felt your character was tiny, and had to angle the camera upwards to see the other person’s face.

When you are in your craft, the view is locked inside the cockpit (you can’t change the camera to view from behind), and each cockpit looks different. Their attributes and load-outs can require different strategies. For example, X-Wings are quite balanced, Y-Wings are built for bombing runs, A-Wings are extremely fast and nimble. The Empire’s ships have no shields but they can focus extra power to speed or lasers.

All ships allow you to switch energy to focus on balance, speed, lasers or shields (Rebels only) by pressing the number keys 1-4 (if you play with keyboard). If you are focussing on speed, you can then press the spacebar to boost.

For keyboard controls, A and D rotates your ship, and W and S accelerates or slows down. Weirdly, your ship can come to a standstill, which I don’t recall happening in any Star Wars film or game. Usually there is a minimum speed. Staying at a standstill means you can play like a fixed turret, but you are also an easy target to be shot at.

The main component of Squadrons is its 5v5 online multiplayer. There’s not many maps and they largely play similarly. There is a team deathmatch mode as well as the Fleet Battles mode; an objective-based tug-of-war. Each team starts off with a flagship and two frigates, and your goal is to first destroy the frigates, then you are allowed to target the flagship. There is a morale bar which you increase by defeating enemies, and once it is full, an AI Corvette appears to help launch an attack, whilst the opposition falls back to defend. This repeats until the flagship is destroyed.

I thought Squadrons was decent enough but I never felt that engrossed in it. I’d imagine it would be much more immersive if you play in VR.