Squadron 42 is the single-player, story-driven portion of the world's most successful Kickstarter project, Star Citizen. The game, which originally made use of Crytek's CryEngine, has made the move to Amazon's CryEngine-based Lumberyard engine, which should deliver impressive visuals as well. Squadron 42 is being sold in a standalone version costing $45, and for that price, Cloud Imperium games is promising an epic sci-fi story, populated by more than 10 hours of performance capture of top-tier actors like Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, and Gillian Anderson, just to name a few (Andy Serkis also makes an appearance, he who is one of the most talented performance-capture actors of our times.)

With all those features, you'd be forgiven for asking "But will it run Squadron 42'" out of your current or future hardware - especially considering the history of CryEngine-based games. however, the system requirements are at the same time vague and, for the most part, unimpressive. They call for Windows 7 through 10 (DX11 title), a DX11-capable graphics card with minimum 2GB VRAM, and 4GB strongly recommended, a quad-core CPU, and the outlier of this sample, 16GB+ of system RAM. An SSD is also strongly recommended for the experience, which isn't all that surprising considering Lumberyard's roots.

Crytek has filed a suit against Cloud Imperium Games (developers of Star Citizen and Squadron 42) for wrongdoings regarding Crytek's CryEngine. Cloud Imperium Games has recently moved over to Amazon's Lumberyard, a free, cross-platform triple-A game engine which has been built-upon by Amazon, based and licensed from Crytek's CryEngine in 2015. Apparently, in doing so, Cloud Imperium Games has violated a number of agreed-upon items on their engine licensing contract, for which Crytek is now going after for damages and compensation.

The essence of the suit stands in that Crytek only licenced its engine for the development of a single game - Star Citizen - and that CIG is now developing a second one in Squadron 42, for which it had no rights to use Crytek's IP and assets. Futhermore, CIG agreed, when signing the contract, to use Crytek's logos as part of the game development and final game presentation, so as to provide awareness for the company, but has since removed them from all instances of the game.