“Star Wars Squadrons” Massive Let Down

So I’ve had faith in many Star Wars games and Squadrons was no different. I watched the trailers and didn’t get any interest in playing the game until they released a CG short promoting the story/game.

I went out and bought the game, recently spent hours playing the game and testing the story, multiplayer, and other features out that are in the game. While many things I enjoyed, I’m sad to say the game was a letdown.

Story/Campaign

The story started off in the point of view of the Empire, where “survivors” of Alderaan were escaping and we saw a captain in the Empire defect and save the survivors and join up with the Rebels (something we’ve gotten before in the movies as well as animated shows). Then all of a sudden there was a 4-year time jump? like why? We’ve missed out on important stuff in the story.

The story continued and everything I’ve played I lost interest in the story because the gameplay is very repetitive and the story is just bland. The gameplay is essentially shooting these ships, escort this ship, blow up the towers, shoot more ships.

It’s also a VR game mainly, you can not walk around or move, you are literally just stationary and to enter your ships or the briefing room you literally look and click X.

Multiplayer

Even with a bland story and repetitive gameplay, I tried multiplayer, and oh boy was this a huge disappointment. I will give them props, they did put a fun mode in but it was nothing special, good concept but boring.

The multiplayer side of things only had 3 modes available, the first mode was “dogfight” a simple team deathmatch mode in a 5 v 5 setting. The next mode was locked until you reached level 5 and it was Fleet Battles against real players online.

The third mode was bad… It was Fleet Battles but against the AI. You could customize the mode to how you liked, map, difficulty, faction, etc but once again, it was boring and insanely long to play.

I figured while I was bored, I’d at least play it and spent countless hours playing through the story missions and got to mission 10 and the game bugged, went into an infinite loading screen so I restarted from the last checkpoint because it was the end of the mission and it wouldn’t let me control the ship so the ship flew endlessly into space on its own.

I tried resetting multiple times and each time I was like a rock floating through space. This was my last straw and I turned the game off. There was also another issue of the demo they released on EA Access, they gave you 10 hours worth of gameplay but only 2 missions to play. Other games give you the entire game to play. This was disappointing too.

Customization

The customization was lackluster. We got to customize our TIE fighter, as well as the Rebel pilot you controlled, the customization for this, was bad. The option was 8 heads, 2 bodies, and a few voices.

I will give them props because the ship customization was better and saved this part of the review. We got to choose the color of the X-Wing as well as inside the cockpit. The TIE fighter was similar and we decent things you could add.

Moving on from the customization I’ll also give them props on the flying. The flying was so fun in the game and was semi-decent. The movement of the ships was great and the sound effects were spot on.

Overall Review

I went in with an open mind and was disappointed. The game had some decent aspects but overall was a major let down. I don’t know what they have planned for the future but at the minute it’s not worth the price.

Rating: 5.8/10