A long time ago (okay, like, a week or two) in a galaxy far, far away that, to be honest, looks a lot like ours, I clambered into the cockpit of an X-Wing for the first time and fell in love. Developed by Star Wars Battlefront’s Motive Studios, Star Wars: Squadrons is a first-person, arcade-class flight sim that drops you into your choice of a series of iconic spaceships from George Lucas’s sci-fantasy universe, including X-, A-, U-, and Y-Wings, and TIE models. Your days of blasting womp rats in a T-16 are over, kid.
The game delivers some of the most exhilarating (and disorienting) space battles that I’ve experienced since 2003’s genre-defining Freelancer. It’s a 360-degree ballet of death and explosions between the stars, deployed at a smooth-as-Lando-Calrissian 60 frames-per-second in crispy-as-Uncle-Owen-and-Aunt-Beru 4K splendour. Or close to it, because the Star Wars: Squadrons uses a dynamic resolution scaling system on consoles, but that frame-rate didn’t wobble for even a second on my Xbox One X.
So, it performs exceptionally well, but the visuals and audio are also superb. In fact, I was distracted at times by the authenticity of the game’s design – from the lasers bouncing of the decks of Star Destroyers to the Industrial Light & Magic prop shop greebles of cruisers and space stations, and the idiosyncratic screech of TIE Fighters that defies physics but it wouldn’t be the same without it, Star Wars: Squadrons is fan service at its most extravagantly indulgent. And its most dizzyingly vomit-inducing in VR, I expect [unless you’re me, and even the non-VR version is dizzyingly vomit-inducing – Tarryn].
After completing an intro tutorial mission, the campaign jumps up subsequent to the events of Return of The Jedi and the nuking of Palpatine’s second Death Star. The plot mostly involves “Project Starhawk”, a secret New Republic scheme that the Galactic Empire obviously wants to shut down. The hook in Star Wars: Squadrons, though, is that you get to play on both sides of the ensuing drama, swapping from one mission to the next between a rookie of the New Republic’s Vanguard Squadron and the Galactic Empire’s Titan Squadron, with a supporting cast of NPCs. You can also customise your pilots from a selection of pre-sets, but you won’t actually see or hear them much.
Each faction has a distinctive sort of feel to its spaceships, and a different gameplay experience – the New Republic’s spaceships, for example, have shields but most of the Galactic Empire’s spaceships don’t. Spaceships can also be equipped with custom mods to accommodate your gameplay preferences and tactical necessities. If you’re taking on a Star Destroyer, you’ll probably want to load up your X-Wing with ArMek H/M Seeker Warheads to neutralise incoming missiles and a repair droid to neutralise everything else.
Spaceship management isn’t limited to pre-mission custom mods, though, and is a constant feature of combat – you’ll also have to decide, moment to moment, where your spaceship’s power will be most useful, and divert systems accordingly. If you need to rush into a skirmish, you can transfer power to the engines for some extra boost, or if you’re going on the offensive, transfer power to your weapons instead. Ooooops, you’ve inconveniently made yourself a target? No problem, transfer power to your back shields and break out, or transfer even more power to your guns and vaporise those Rebel scum. And if you’re not doing this at least two or three or ten times a minute, you certainly won’t last long in the multiplayer modes against actual real people.
Star Wars: Squadrons has two multiplayer modes, Dogfight and Fleet Battles. Dogfight is a standard 5v5 team deathmatch mode, and the first team to 30 kills wins. Fleet Battles is also a team deathmatch mode, but plays out over a sequence of stages – it’s like Dogfight until one team has clocked enough kills to max out the “Morale” meter and take out the enemy’s defences, then their frigates, and finally, destroying the big boi capital spaceship for the win. Of course, the Morale meter can fluctuate a lot in each stage, like a cosmic tug-of-war, so be prepared for a long fight.