3.5/5 ★ – sirvalkyerie's review of STAR WARS™: Squadrons.

What I was most struck by was the overall quality of Star Wars: Squadrons. I had figured that the game was done on a cheap(ish) budget and spiraled out as a quick pseudo-indie passion project published by EA as a another means of trying to cash in on the Star Wars license. This isn't entirely untrue, altogether. But the game doesn't come across as unfinished in any form. Specifically the campaign, which I'd ballpark as between 10-15 hours depending on the difficulty level and your skill. Well voiced, well animated, nicely drawn transition screens. All fairly top notch for a game that most people would have been genuinely fine with it having no campaign at all. Very Call of Duty-esque in the sense that no one is playing this for the campaign mode but the campaign mode was brilliant anyway. I was very happy with the story that was told and I felt like playing the Dark Side and Light Side simultaneously in an intertwined story was quite cool. I enjoyed the control schemes and the cockpit view. It was just as fun to play the game with zero aids or visual assists as it was to play with them all flicked on. I very much enjoyed how different the ships felt from one another both in their cockpit views as well as their armament options and handling. Flying an A-Wing is a legitimately very different experience than flying a Y-Wing. While those who can remember the last Star Wars game with multiple flyable ship types (the original Star Wars Battlefront 2 [OGSWBF2]) had a bevvy of ships, most of them felt quite similar on the whole except for what their secondary weapon did. Squadrons can almost feel like a different game based on ship type and kit. It changes your role entirely. Squadrons isn't a truly hardcore flight sim in really any form or fashion. But it's closer to flight sim than it is to arcade experience like OGSWBF2. Of course you're not going to stall your TIE Fighter like you would a Boeing 767 but you're also not able to pull of super special tricks or flips or anything zany. The ships have weight and how you fly it matters. I thought it did a nicer job than say Elite: Dangerous or even whatever is playable of Star Citizen. There are some warts though, on what is otherwise, largely, a competent and fun game. First is that this game is definitely more fun with a HOTAS than a controller (and it's unplayable with a kb+m). Not that you can't do well and have fun with your controller, but certainly a HOTAS would make this game damn fun to play as the entire game is more or less constructed around exactly what a HOTAS would provide you with. This is a weak critique but at the same time the game is levels different in enjoyability based solely on your choice of input. The input type probably rears its head in what I'd say is the most disappointing aspect of Squadrons; the campaign difficulty. The campaign mode throws at you some wildly unfair challenges at times that just don't wind up feeling fun. You and your three squadmates have to take on thirty TIE Fighters and two capital ships. Sometimes even more than this. It's a slog at best and often feels plain unfair. It doesn't even necessarily make you a better in-game pilot, because even the multiplayer fleet battles don't quite feel the same. You're tasked with shooting down fleets that are just not feasible for a group of hangar ships to take down solo. While the chaos is pretty and the battles feel grand, most missions require substantial actions from you as an individual in order to win. Which is fine in the narrative structure of you as ace pilot but doesn't feel great in gameplay when you're the deciding factor for taking down three corvettes. And this happens frequently. The difficulty slider feels unfair. Higher difficulties mean more enemies that miss less often. It doesn't necessarily mean anything tactically more engaging. It's better than the typical difficulty slider just being bullet sponges, and to their credit I'm not sure how else you'd increase difficulty in Squadrons. But it doesn't feel great. The nature of the story missions also means there are big peaks and valleys in the difficulty. At some points you're simply dogfighting against 10 enemies and *maybe* a support ship like a freighter or corvette. This is manageable even on highest difficulties as a skilled pilot. But the story missions come in stages so after you've defeated the enemies in dogfighting the next stage of the mission becomes an assault on a Star Destroyer. So now you're bombarding a Star Destroyer that is flanked by several support ships and anywhere from 15-50 TIE Fighters. At this point the difficulty on the highest difficulty settings goes from challenging to just Dark Souls no damage run challenging. Now the meat of the game is the multiplayer. And the multiplayer is just fine. I am not a fan of how limiting they are with the armaments or the need to use in-game currencies to unlock them. Especially after allowing you to use that full repertoire in the campaign mode. It sucks to go into multiplayer and feel very gimped. I very dislike it. Also can't say I'm a fan of the cosmetics since they are all pilot based cosmetics and you see your pilot in game (and teammates' pilots) for a total of 45 seconds or so. Would've made a lot more sense to put cosmetics on the ships themselves like paint schemes or bobbles. Maybe things that go on your dash in the ship. Sound effects on kills or explosion effects like scoring a Rocket League goal. Once you finally start levelling up your ships you start doing better in multiplayer snice you're not held back by only being able to use the base fitting. I did notice that in unranked play the matchmaking seemed poor. I don't think it matches anything skill-based in the unranked dogfighting game mode. In my first few hours flying, I was matched against people with account levels of 60 or 80 while I was still <5. That being said, however, I did often hold my own. Only a handful of times did I ever feel like I was truly terrible or holding my team back. Most of the time I felt like a competent member and even a few times I was the best on my team. In dogfighting at least. All of the ships felt balanced and I felt that the support ships in particular were almost busted in how good they were. A dedicate support or two on your team that had half-a-brain could really give your team a huge leg up. But I was disappointed that the only dogfighting mode is the unranked gameplay. There isn't a ranked dogfighting mode. And the only ranked mode is fleet battles (vaguely reminiscent of the space battles in OGSWBF2) which had no unranked counterpart. I suppose the distinction here is to not divide the playerbase between too many queues but it still felt lame. I'd rather they just offer fleet battles and dogfighting in both queues and make it random which you get when you hop into queue. Sort of how Apex Legends switches between alternating maps for each new season. I also thought the number of available ships was ultimately a little unfortunate. While the Empire ships definitely operate different than the Republic ships, there is still too much sameyness between them. The TIE Fighter and X-Wing are a lot different but I can't say I felt like the Interceptor and A-Wing were as different. the TIE Bomber and Y-Wing feel quite similar too. In the end it's ten ships but really feels like 6 or 7 ships in gameplay style and it just feels like too few. There's plenty of ships to choose from in the Star Wars galaxy and while they stuck to the biggest names, you could just as easily have flown some Jedi Starfighters, E-Wings (which became a bigger part of the New Republic fleet specifically during this exact time period Squadrons takes place in), VT-49s, TIE Punishers or even 'uglies' like X-TIES/TIE-Wings. This is of course without even bothering to mention ships available from the Clone Wars periods or earlier which could have also just as easily been implemented for a multiplayer mode. I suppose for some canon reasons you'd like to pit capable starfighters against one another but it certainly isn't a requirement for a multiplayer mode. In other Star Wars games you can have Yoda fighting Luke or whoever so clearly that level of canon isn't really required. In a game all about flying spaceships in a sim-arcade hybrid it felt like you should have more ships available. It's not like a Valorant where one shot kills you. It's not a skillshot game. It's not like a MOBA where you need hundreds of different champions. I don't think it needed a bajillion ships but I think more variety would've been warranted in a game where the ships are as fun as the gameplay. All-in-all Squadrons is fun. It's a good game and a game I'm happy we got. It's a game I'm happy I got to play. I enjoyed it. I do have to wonder if it occupies a weird space that's too hard or in-depth for arcade-y CoD-esque players while being not in-depth enough for flight sim enthusiasts. But it's survived awhile now with a robust playerbase still for multiplayer matchups (I never had a queue longer than 30 seconds) so it clearly did something right.