Gameplay

If you are a child of the 90s, you'll definitely remember the 1993 Star Wars X-Wing game and maybe even Rebel Assault—one of the first games that required a CD-ROM and made good use of it, delivering graphics that were unimaginable at the time. Fast forward 27 (!) years, and we have graphics that are several orders of magnitude better than the pre-rendered FMV sequences of Rebel Assault and the primitive vector graphics of X-Wing.

The Star Wars Squadrons campaign puts you in the seat of both Rebel and Imperial fighters—you get to pilot the legendary X-wing, but also the TIE fighter and many other ship types. EA has created a typical Star Wars story that is told from the perspective of two pilots from opposing factions. Technically, the story is not much to write home about, but it is told very well. Every couple of missions, you'll switch sides, which creates a unique kind of immersion into the plot, letting you see both sides of the war. Unlike other recent Star Wars titles, the gameplay is space combat only, which is perfectly fine with me—there are plenty of 3D shooters these days, but almost no Wing Commander-like space flying simulators.

Yes, I would claim Star Wars Squadron is closer to a "simulator" than an "arcade" game—a good thing. While the barrier of entry is extremely low and you'll shoot down enemies in no time, the skill ceiling is quite high, especially once you increase the difficulty and optionally turn off the HUD assistance features. When the latter is disabled, you'll actually have to look at the navigation instruments inside the cockpit—no more hand holding.

Once you're in your ship, the basic controls are for speed, direction, and weapons—as expected. Playing with a gamepad or keyboard/mouse is supported and works well. You may also use a HOTAS, which seems to be suffering from a lack of polish, bugs, and feature support if going by some forum comments. Most ships have a primary "laser" weapon system and one or two extra capabilities, usually rockets, missile defense, or some kind of repair system. An additional tactical layer exists in the form of energy distribution—you may distribute energy between weapons, engines, and shields evenly or customize the setting for more firepower or to hold out longer when under fire.

Multiplayer progression works similar to Call of Duty and Battlefield. As you play multiplayer matches, you earn points you can spend on unlocking various components; engine, laser, missile, etc. In single-player, there's no character development and no skill tree. You are free to swap out equipment before story missions, though; on some, you even get to pick which ship you want to fly.

What's most important is that Star Wars Squadrons gives you that Star Wars feeling. You really feel like Luke Skywalker when you're flying around a capital ship, trying to take out turrets or a shield generator. The campaign further reinforces that experience with a basic but immersive single-player experience that prepares you for multiplayer.

With a price of $39.99, Star Wars Squadrons is much more reasonably priced than other big titles; there are no microtransactions or DLCs (yet). The multiplayer aspect is decent, but there's plenty of space for expansion—like more complex missions and bigger maps. Overall, I'm happy that I've tried Star Wars Squadrons and can definitely recommend it to any Star Wars fan or space flight combat aficionado. Others should definitely check out some gameplay videos to see if it suits their taste.

PC Port / Tech / Graphics / Performance

Visually, Star Wars Squadrons looks great because of the Frostbite engine which also powers the Battlefield titles. Unfortunately, there's only support for DirectX 11, no raytracing or DLSS, either. You can tell from our screenshots that the ship models look good, maybe a little bit plasticky. Texture details are fine most of the time as long as you stay sufficiently far from objects—collisions are quite rare. The capital ships are richly detailed. While there is no raytracing, lighting works very well. You often notice ships or asteroids casting a shadow on your ship, which dims the cockpit insides—enough to be noticeable but not in an annoying way, which would probably be the physically more appropriate representation.

Video memory usage is minimal; depending on the resolution, we measured 3–4 GB, which really isn't much for a video game in 2020. A space simulator is not as demanding in terms of texture memory because there is no terrain that needs to be loaded—I still wish EA had given us more options for texture fidelity to make better use of available VRAM.

Both AMD and NVIDIA have released game-ready drivers for Star Wars Squadrons, which we used for all our testing. We also used the latest public version of the game, not a press pre-release, and didn't encounter any major bugs or crashes. Actually, the UI and flow feels well polished for a $40 title. However, You may sometimes realize that the game wasn't made with a huge budget, mostly when watching the clunky character animations in some cutscenes. There's quite a lot of keys and key combinations to learn if you plan on playing with mouse and keyboard—remapping these is a breeze and worth it.

Sounds and music are great, and definitely Star Wars quality. Cooldowns and similar events you want to be aware of are indicated by audio cues, and the ship audio and droids are well-implemented too. The epic Star Wars film music is also present, no complaints about the voice acting, either, for both the story and the in-flight speech.

Graphics hardware requirements are minimal. The game runs nearly at twice the FPS of typical games today. For example, the aging GTX 1060 3 GB achieves 100 FPS at Full HD and 70 FPS at 1440p. A GTX 1660 Super gets you over 100 FPS in 1440p, and 4K 60 FPS is in reach with a GTX 1070 Ti or Vega 56. Remember, this is at highest details. Cards like the Radeon RX 5700 XT almost hit 100 FPS at 4K, and the recent Ampere releases by NVIDIA, RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, achieve even higher frame rates at 4K—154 FPS and 173 FPS, respectively.

As mentioned before, Frostbite powers the Battlefield series, which means every GPU vendor has already invested major resources into optimizing their drivers for this engine. Just like in Battlefield, AMD handles the rendering better, especially Vega generation cards do very well, and RDNA is close behind. It's quite rare to see the Radeon RX 5700 XT trade blows with the RTX 2080 Super; usually, we'd expect it to be between the RTX 2070 and 2070 Super. At higher resolution, NVIDIA manages to close the gap, though. Vega 64 is even more impressive as it beats the RTX 2060 Super conclusively—usually, it matches the RTX 2060. On the NVIDIA side, we only see tiny differences between Pascal and Turing. Surprisingly, Ampere performance looks slightly less optimized than its two predecessors.

Had the developer implemented support for DLSS, things could be different, but I guess the motivation to do so wasn't high, given the high FPS rates all cards enjoy. On the other hand, DLSS support could be useful for VR gaming, which is supported by Star Wars Squadrons. The forums are full of threads complaining about broken VR support—if they can fix that, Squadrons could become the killer application for VR that Rebel Assault was for CD-ROM back in the day.

Overall, you really won't have to worry about graphics performance even with older hardware. Should you still want higher FPS, there are plenty of options to fine-tune the details settings. At this time, there is a bug when running over 60 FPS. Users of 144 Hz monitors should try capping the framerate at 59 or 60 FPS for a much more fluid experience. The developer Motive Studios has already acknowledged this bug and is working on a fix.

Support for raytracing would have been awesome, as that could add ray-traced reflections of your own fighter on capital ships, raytraced ambient occlusion would have helped with detail in asteroids, and RT shadows would make the visuals even more believable. Maybe in a future patch, however doubtful, especially at the low price point. Still, Star Wars Squadrons is a beautiful-looking game that runs very well because of years of optimization for the Frostbite Engine.