One of my favorite games of all time is Star Wars: TIE Fighter. I played its predecessor, X-Wing, and its sequels X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and X-Wing: Alliance but none of them ever quite captured the same feel that TIE Fighter did. It mixed a fun Imperial narrative, one of the first of its kind (if not the first) for Star Wars, with an excellent flight sim. The sim was somehow inviting for new players while also being exceedingly complex and tough to master. It was a perfect combination.
Since the heyday of Star Wars flight sims in the mid to late 90s, it has been pretty barren. Even the arcade style flight combat games have been left behind (Rogue Squadron III was 2003) but while 2020 has been a shit show for a lot of valid reasons, it did bring us the return of the Star Wars space sim, with Star Wars: Squadrons. And it is everything I’ve been wanting for two decades.
Squadrons is narrative focused, taking place after the events of Return of the Jedi, with interweaving storylines for both the New Republic and the remnants of the Empire. It’s an interesting look at the after effects of the Emperor’s death and how the Empire didn’t just fade away but became this splintered faction still trying to rule the galaxy. While there is a lot of story told in missions and in dramatic cutscenes, the bulk of it is told in the conversations in and around the mission briefings.
What is a bit weird here though is that in many cases, the Empire’s actions are despicable but the squadmates you get just kind of go along with it. They’ve bought into the law and order message that the Empire uses to scare people into submission and honestly, it’s a bit too close to home this year.
Story aside, Squadrons needs to succeed on its merits as a space sim and considering this is one that is being played by most people on a gamepad, it’s damn good. Yes, it’s a bit dumbed down but it has everything you expect, including system management to boost engines, shields or weapons. And the gamepad implementation is nothing short of brilliant. But if you want a more genuine feel, don’t worry the game has full HOTAS support on both PC and consoles and it works quite well once you get it set up. Sadly, HOTAS just wasn’t super conducive to how I was playing on Xbox One but it does work if you have a comfortable setup to do it in. And the missions are fairly standard for this type of game but there are some exciting scenarios and I was always having fun with them, even if some of them feel recycled from games 20 plus years old.
Single player is the draw for me but Squadrons also supports a fully fleshed out multiplayer with a pair of great modes. One is simple dog fighting, X-Wings vs. TIE Fighters (or your choice of New Republic vs. Imperial starfighter), and the other is a full on fleet battle where each side is attempting to destroy the other’s capital ship. Both modes feature small squads vs each other but are populated with AI ships too (think the grunts in Titanfall but more deadly). And if you aren’t into competitive play, there is a Fleet Battle mode vs. AI so you can play that co-op without having someone message you for being terrible. To note though, I played this with friends and we had trouble even on the “easy” setting.
As I said, Squadrons is everything I’ve been wanting for two decades and I think if you have a love of Star Wars and space sims, it will be everything you’ve been wanting too. And it seems people agree with me on this as the game has been doing quite well, so much so that developer Motive has added in new (and free) content to the game after initially stating that there would be no post launch support other than patches and server maintenance.
4*
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