It’s been a while since I’ve posted a detailed review of a video game, but the hugely anticipated Star Wars: Squadrons is just too good a material for a pass on it! The three films in the Star Wars sequel trilogy have proven to mostly be between a mixed bag and outright disappointment for most fans of the space opera. What with its plenty of characters who were hyped up and only tossed aside when directors changed, the inclusion of all kinds of dodgy force abilities and physics that wrecked all the established canon before it in earlier films, and the huge, huge plot holes and nonsensical story arcs throughout that trilogy. So, it wasn’t much of a surprise to industry that the person felt most responsible for the downward spiral in Star Wars-verse – Kathleen Kennedy – is leaving Disney, and the entertainment giant is even looking into resetting Star Wars altogether.
My fondest memory of Star Wars though before the prequel films from the end 1990s were actually three games: Rebel Assault, a cinematic rail-shooter that made many nerds invest in their very first CD-ROM drive, and the two Star Wars-centered space-craft action-simulation games that followed: X-Wing, and TIE Fighter – mid-1990s titles that put players into the controls of the two most well-known fighter craft in the original film trilogy. While there have been several games after that time that let players fly around in these same fighter craft – in particular the Star Wars Battlefront games – those space dogfighting missions were invariably simplified, water-down arcade-like material – with little of the more simulation-like nuances found in the mid-1990s games.
Star Wars: Squadrons is a return to those two games of 1993 and 1994, and this time you’re a member of a squadron of five pilots of either the New Republic or The Empire, and battling it out with the other side. Yep, it’s both X-Wing and TIE Fighter, in that you get to play both sides. And it’s been quite an experience completing the game’s 14 mission-long single-player campaign of around 8 hours. My summary recommendation with all things considered: this is a must-buy for fans of Star Wars interested in the fighter cockpit experience of the films’ space battles.
My comments of the game!
The visuals are – as expected and in line with how far video game graphics technology has improved since the mid-1990s – absolutely gorgeous. With settings set on ultra and playing in 1080p resolution on the Gigabyte Aero-15 X9 with its RTX2070 MaxQ GPU, frame rate was largely acceptable at around 40-50 fps, with very occasional stutters and dropped frames when the game is loading new content. There are loads of tidy little visual effects, including various space phenomenon (e.g. lightning, and even lava (!)), stunningly rendered explosions as capital ships break-apart when they’re taken down, and even debris that splatter into your cockpit windows when you’ve blasted an enemy fighter into space dust. Simply put too, there just aren’t any other Star Wars games currently out there with such incredibly detailed capital ships – particularly the Imperial Star Destroyers. Of the latter, there’s one early scene in the campaign that shows the front perspective of an ISD, and the level of visual fidelity of the capital ship is just jaw-dropping.
The audio environment is similarly great, and pounds on the auditory senses: capital ship lasers, fighter lasers, missiles, torpedoes, the roar of TIE fighters as they zoom past you, the mechanical stress of your own fighter craft as you turn and roll, and the chatter of your squadron mates, and (occasionally) that of your opponents. And adding to this, the game’s music composer who has taken John Williams’ themes and given them extensions. OK, so a good portion of the audio experience isn’t grounded in reality – that thing about sound not traveling in space etc. – but man, Star Wars: Squadrons looks and sounds fantastic!
The 14 missions in the single-player campaign are varied in both where in space it’s set, and also the general sequence and outlay of objectives. The range of objectives themselves aren’t too wide-ranging though, and are drawn from the usual palette that isn’t very different from other space action-simulation games: destroying enemy forces, defending, and escort – with minor variations occasionally. I also remembered the missions of the older games being generally longer, with more objectives to meet each mission. Missions that took 30 to 45 minutes each time weren’t uncommon. The overall pacing in Squadrons is quicker, and most missions routinely take no more than 30 minutes, and the game also offers a checkpoint system so you don’t have to repeat the difficult parts that you just managed to squeak past.
The dual perspectives of the campaign is a bit of a mixed bag though. Sure, you get two games for the price of one now – in that you pilot both New Republic and also Imperial fighters – and the contrasting perspectives of how one mission went is effective from a narrative standpoint. However, the constant switching of sides – you could be flying one mission as a New Republic pilot, and the next as an Imperial – was mildly disorienting for me. On more than one occasion, I forgot who I was flying for, and blasted the ships of my own side into smithereens haha.
The material in-between missions is also a mixed bag. It’s in a sense somewhat familiar if you’ve played the old Wing Commander games: your squadron mates are around to provide you their personal backstories alongside pre and post mission banter. You don’t get to move around too much though within the capital ship you’re based in: it’s basically just the hanger, and the briefing room. No cantinas, no training rooms, no personal locker rooms for a change of scenery – and there are no dialogue options to speak of, nor do you actually reply to any of the dialogue either. The mission briefings are also fairly succinct – I would have liked them to be more detailed, but I reckon that each mission doesn’t really have that many objectives to begin with meant that the briefings themselves were likewise not going to be long either. The game characters – your squadron mates, and the handful of other personnel and officers in either side – mostly converse with you while stationery though, so it’s not visually interesting for the most part, excepting a couple of scenes where characters move around a room. The voice-acting at least doesn’t detract from the overall experience.
I also didn’t find the cast of characters particularly memorable, excepting one on each side: Frisk, a Trandoshan squaddie on the side of the New Republic, and Shen, an Imperial who never takes off his helmet. I thought these two had a bit more personality compared to the rest. But voice acting and visual representations aside, your mates don’t seem to exhibit much differentiation when actually flying: as in, they seem all equally good (or bad) and determined by the difficulty level you’ve set. I again remember the old Wing Commander games: your squadron mates had personality when in the cockpit and displayed varying fighting styles. One pilot would always rush headlong first, while another rarely followed your orders etc. that sort of thing.
I also appreciate that Squadrons doesn’t try to rehash old material in its single-player campaign. So no, you’re not flying either of the Death Star trench run missions in this game! The campaign starts off just after the destruction of Alderaan and in large part to establish its primary characters, and then moves to post destruction of the second Death Star four years later for the rest of it. The narrative tonally is consistent too with that timeline: the Emperor is dead, the empire is scrambling to establish a sense of order among its own internal factions, it can no longer be as generous in its expenditure of resources, and the New Republic is wrestling with its new found responsibilities amid the chaos.
I also tried playing the game with keyboard and mouse and gave up early on in the first mission: controlling your fighter craft precisely is just too difficult with the mouse. I dug out my seven year old Logitech Extreme 3D Pro joystick just for this, and the game became playable with it. The game – campaign at least so far – also keeps you squarely in the cockpit. There’s free-look, and that’s it. No third person viewpoint for that out of body experience, and no removal of the cockpit overlay too.
The game – very nicely – also supports VR at no additional cost, and I tried it out on my Oculus Quest. But boy, the VR mode was completely unplayable for me – nausea kicked in in just 5 seconds; a new record! But from the little amount of time I spent in the VR version of this game, Squadrons is clearly a made for VR game. The amount of detail when looking around the fighter cockpit is incredible, as is also the additional visual information you easily get from truly free-looking at the space around you.
I encountered one serious game bug too. I was on mission 7, the game crashed, and I found my progress reset to the start of the campaign again. And I had to redo all my missions up till that point one more time. Bleh.
In all, I had a blast with the single-player campaign, and have just started getting my feet wet with the multiplayer content too. The campaign isn’t very long, and I would have preferred a longer mission list, and more complex missions too – but oh well. I picked up the game at a relatively low price of around USD40, and that money was well-spent for the exhilarating experience I obtained in return. Recommended!
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