With all the ups and downs I have experienced with various Star Wars media products over the past decades, the formative space action simulations of X-Wing and TIE Fighter on MS-DOS (or at least my recollection) have always been a highlight. It’s hard to get lost focusing on the details of inherently cool Sci-Fi fantasy planes, as opposed to what’s happening now with Jedi lines or space politics.
There have been a few Star Wars Arcade-style space action games that have filled the 20-year period since the last flight simulator, and some of them were even good. But Star Wars: Squadrons is now returning to some of the intricacies of the simulator, while retaining much of the accessible spectacle of Arcade-style flight games. And the balance squads have adapted very well to create an experience that makes you feel like you are really an active participant in a star wars.
The basic mechanics will be familiar to you if you have ever played a flying game. You put your fighter up and down, you tilt it left and right. They fly forward, not backward, and they can turn until they feel sick. They maneuver their crosshairs at an enemy, then fire lasers or missiles at him. You are bound to a first-person cockpit view of the action, but all the Squadron missions are in space, which means you don’t have to worry about altitude hold, and instead you have the wonderful freedom of being able to fly along each axis – roll your ship and it feels like you can finish the relay campaign with these principles if you want, especially on lower difficulty levels, and that’s great. But Squadrons goes a step further with the ability to redirect your ship’s power supply, a system that adds a nice layer of complexity to the advantages it can open up to you and the considerations that accompany it.
Each starfighter in the squadrons has the ability to rebalance the energy input to give priority to different components of the ship: the engines, the laser weapons and, on some ships, the shield system. In this way, you will have access to specific advantages associated with this system at the expense of reducing the efficiency of others. Redirecting all the power to the engines makes your ship more maneuverable, gives you a faster top speed and loads an increase in speed; Giving priority to lasers allows you to overload them and fire them for a longer time; focus shields allow them to rerate faster and overload them to absorb more damage than normal.
In addition, ships with shields can also choose to redirect the shield cover forward or backward, or balance it anywhere. It’s not exactly on par with the Star Wars simulators of the 90s (the power redirection is not as granular and you can’t adjust your firing patterns or anything like that), but the remarkable systems are there, and there’s still a lot to think about when you’re in the middle of a battle
You can balance systems equally while staying in order, but it’s exciting to make those quick decisions in the middle of a Mission and act more like the ace Pilot you should be. Of course, you can simply fly your x-Wing over the Star damageder and fire at its target module until your lasers run out, taking damage in the process and then repeating. But you could certainly do things much more efficiently if you shift the power on your shields when you approach to overload them, switch everything to the Laser when you start firing to get a dozen more shots before overheating, then push everything on the engines while pressing the accelerator to get out of the way, and quickly move all your shields backwards to absorb all the fire from the tower that is coming at you. Constantly engaging in these mechanisms in addition to the objectives of your mission can give you a complicated and exciting advantage even for the simplest missions, especially if you know that you could expose yourself to more risks if you are in a bad configuration for the Situation.
The commands are easy to execute (mapped to a controller’s D-pad by default, although you can reconfigure all the controls), which means that the challenge is to internalize the best options for the situations you find yourself in and not forget to change things when the time comes, in the heat of the moment.
Of course, the feedback you get when playing with these systems goes a long way to making the experience truly satisfying, and the proven Star Wars production design is implemented well in Squadrons. The familiar sounds of droids and proton torpedoes are strangely soothing, and it is very exciting to hear the creak of Titan as you walk past a tie that you have just erased. The unique Cockpits of each ship also look great, with easy-to-read gauges that do not betray the excellent retro-futuristic boxing of the ships themselves. Personally, I appreciated the extra touch of 70s Chic with fantastic hairstyles on some of the pilots, although some of the more “cool” campaign characters obviously didn’t get the memo.