Review
Played on: Xbox Series X
Released: 2020
Spectacular, spaceship battles are synonymous with the Star Wars franchise. With releases like Star Wars Arcade, X-Wing and Tie Fighter far behind in the history of Star Wars games, it’s a franchise that has suited the spaceship shooter genre. Often crossing the line of sci-fi and flight simulators.
A far more recent title and a purchase inspired by the fun I had controlling spaceships in Battlefront II, review here, is Star Wars Squadrons. I played through its campaign but never reviewed it back in 2020. For the current gen of consoles, Xbox Series S/X were the only consoles to receive a port, but it utilised the powerful hardware very well.
Let's take a trip into space and take look!
Spectacular, spaceship battles are synonymous with the Star Wars franchise. With releases like Star Wars Arcade, X-Wing and Tie Fighter far behind in the history of Star Wars games, it’s a franchise that has suited the spaceship shooter genre. Often crossing the line of sci-fi and flight simulators.
A far more recent title and a purchase inspired by the fun I had controlling spaceships in Battlefront II, review here, is Star Wars Squadrons. I played through its campaign but never reviewed it back in 2020. For the current gen of consoles, Xbox Series S/X were the only consoles to receive a port, but it utilised the powerful hardware very well.
Let's take a trip into space and take look!
Much like many modern Star Wars stories, it gives an insight into both the rebel and imperial sides. Perfect for a spaceship simulator like this, allowing the player to try all kinds of Star Wars ships.
The main bulk of the story revolves around the building of a massive battleship called the Starhawk with a devastating tractor beam onboard. Spanning various missions from escorting container ships, attacking bases, surveying transport or outright massive space battles, Squadrons has a fair bit of variation in its missions. Albeit all of them take place in space, never on planet surfaces.
There’s a small touch of personalising the experience, after all it’s quite common that space or flight sims are sterile experiences, mainly focusing on the actual flying. In Squadrons you can view the inside of the hangar bay and listen to proper dialogue during the mission briefings, you can even do some dialogue choices for different opinions when talking with other pilots and crew members. It’s hardly a super deep experience, but it adds a personal touch to it all.
Flight takes part inside the cockpit only, which gives an immersive experience, featuring highly recognisable interiors of the famous spaceships from the Star Wars movies. The cockpit uses actual instruments as the HUD, which is a neat touch. Furthermore, the various instrument layout and appearance vary from one kind of spaceship to another, although they have common nominators and colour codes to help the player recognise them. Neat touches all round, but I would've preferred a third person option too.
For those seeking an arcade approach to space battles, much like how Battlefront II was, then I must stress that this is closer to a space simulator. Control of the ship requires skilful power management, routing energy between shields, weapons and speed on the fly. In addition, there’s a way to make the ship slide into turns. Personally, it was a bit beyond my skill set to manage it all while the enemies were attacking, so I had to drop the difficulty to easy.
There’s something to be said about space shooters like this though, when the large battles heat up, with ships buzzing past, laser trails everywhere and massive explosions occur, it’s exciting! Combined with Star Wars music, lasers buzzing by and whopping explosive sounds, it really hits the mark. Reliving those cool spaceship moments from the movies.
For the Xbox Series X version, I could choose between a dynamic 4K resolution in either 60 or 120fps. Although the latter feels smoother and responsive, it drops the resolution and looks blurrier. Both are viable options, but the 120fps isn’t as noticeable here compared to faster moving game genre. For a large TV the 60fps option is a better option for increased visual detail and sharpness. Nevertheless, the high framerate focus is welcome, giving the flying a responsive feel.
Considering the limited visual variety of outer space battles, Squadrons does a solid job when it comes to varying colour schemes, sunsets and depicting large space stations to give a high quality visual appeal. The way sunlight drenches the cockpit instruments as you turn your ship is really neat and the explosions look amazing.
Although the campaign has a quality presentation, the overall experience lacks something to make it stand out. There are these grand space battles, but the 16 missions contained all feel fairly alike. Granted, some of them require a little more manoeuvring inside or alongside structures, but otherwise they all blend into each other.
For many it will be the multiplayer aspect that tempts the most, but there's a lot of experience required to be successful online, so the singleplayer should be mastered before considering going online. I've heard complaints that the singleplayer feels like a quick addition, that the game was just meant to be multiplayer, but I didn't get that vibe. It reminds me a lot of the new Battlefront II campaign: well presented but fairly linear playthrough with little incentive to replay it. As I said, it lacks some truly memorable moments.
Overall, it’s an enjoyable spaceship shooter, with a lot of depth to dive into when it comes to successfully piloting the ships. Although the difficulty can be dialled down and automation put into the power management, I wouldn’t outright recommend it as a purchase for simple, arcade action.
Although the campaign has a quality presentation, the overall experience lacks something to make it stand out. There are these grand space battles, but the 16 missions contained all feel fairly alike. Granted, some of them require a little more manoeuvring inside or alongside structures, but otherwise they all blend into each other.
For many it will be the multiplayer aspect that tempts the most, but there's a lot of experience required to be successful online, so the singleplayer should be mastered before considering going online. I've heard complaints that the singleplayer feels like a quick addition, that the game was just meant to be multiplayer, but I didn't get that vibe. It reminds me a lot of the new Battlefront II campaign: well presented but fairly linear playthrough with little incentive to replay it. As I said, it lacks some truly memorable moments.
Overall, it’s an enjoyable spaceship shooter, with a lot of depth to dive into when it comes to successfully piloting the ships. Although the difficulty can be dialled down and automation put into the power management, I wouldn’t outright recommend it as a purchase for simple, arcade action.
Plus, it’s for the more niche market of players that purely want space battles, otherwise it offers little to it's campaign become engaged into. Those wanting just that, though, are in for a audiovisual treat and throwback to older Star Wars space battle focused releases.
