A NEW YOKE

Exhilarating dogfights make STAR WARS: SQUADRONS a worthy heir to X-Wing vs TIE Fighter.

- Wes Fenlon

Hot damn, I love the A-Wing. Until Star Wars: Squadrons, the speed demon of the Rebellion was never my favorite ship. Rogue Squadron made me an X-Wing diehard, and even when I first played Star Wars: Squadrons on a controller, I didn’t appreciate the joy of piloting what’s basically an aluminum foil cockpit attached to an oversized engine. But when I hooked up the HOTAS, the A-Wing made me forget how much Rise of Skywalker had drained my enthusiasm for all things Star Wars.

Star Wars: Squadrons succeeds where it’s most important. It’s a thrill to pilot these ships a hair’s breadth above the surface of a Star Destroyer and through stunning nebulae more vivid than I could’ve possibly imagined while playing TIE Fighter in the late 1990s. The campaign, which took me about ten hours to complete on the default difficulty, never really surprises, but it does manage to accomplish something noteworthy: This feels like being in Star Wars in a way no game has in a long, long time.

The flying is exactly what I hoped for, with enough nuance to let skilled pilots excel. The central system is power management, just like in the classic X-Wing games. Over the course of the campaign I started to get a feel for exactly when to cut the throttle to make a tight turn, when to flick all my power to weapons to lay on the damage, and how to survive by focusing my shields to the rear to take a few more hits from an enemy blasting away at my tail.