I am past the refund window on Star Wars Squadrons.
I never got into TIE Fighter, X-Wing, or X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter as a kid because I got them in the Lucasarts Collection Vol. IV and found them impenetrable next to Rogue Squadron and especially Rebel Leader’s immediacy and arcade simplicity.
Squadrons is a splitting of the difference but coming from the sim side of things (newtonian physics, power management, first-person view, etc.) to meet would-be Rogue Squadron players. The power management is down to three meters: engines, weapons, and shields. Each has a stat bonus when you divert power to it as well as affecting the relevant cooldown: boost, recharge, and repair.
Playing on a mouse and keyboard is weird, but much less so once I set the “mouse screen motion range” to 100%. I’m curious to try it on a controller and my cheap HOTAS but it seems reasonable on any method - streamlined for the better if you ask me.
It is oddly demanding, especially in the hanger and briefing room (?), but looks great in missions.
I like the saturated color palette next to most Star Wars and AAA stuff.
There is a really weird presentational blemish in the UI looking jaggy/fuzzy at 1440p which seems like a mistake to me considering this is shipping on “4K” consoles.
I’m gonna be at my mother in law’s house all next week but as a huge tie fighter fan from when I was a kid (I think it was the first PC game that really impressed me after consoles!) and the owner of a THRUSTMASTER WARTHOG and a vr headset I feel like I can’t not
also this autumn’s release schedule has bludgeoned me out of nowhere, I am all of a sudden mega pumped for bg3 and holovista and I was just finally getting around to the under presents and I haven’t put as much time into spelunky 2 or ck3 as I’d like
It has a single-player campaign and player-vs-player multiplayer. It doesn’t appear there’s co-op for the campaign, sadly, but you can PvP vs. AI with friends.
Well, I just toggled VR mode on and it launched a VR app called “Starwarssquadrons” (sic) before crashing to desktop. I think this might be EA’s first VR title ever?
I loved TIE fighter as a kid. I think I 100%ed it (all optional objectives completed on every mission). Past the surface technicality of needing to master the targeting system to orient yourself in the world and generally having half the letters on the keyboard do something, it’s a relatively simple game actually.
My favorite memory of the game is the Easter egg where in one of the simulator tutorial missions which have you blow up some passive buoys in a basic TIE fighter, if you attack and destroy the friendly capital ship that comes to pick you up at the end, then the commander gets pissed off at you and sends waves of different kinds of fighters to punish you. The final wave is 12 X-Wings and I was just barely able to beat them on the 10th try.
they should have added webcam support for your team mates that auto generates like a cockpit backdrop that like sparks out and flames up whenever they get fragged and then give a small bonus to the remaining team mates if it detects them doing a proper ‘i’m hit and going down’ death wail
OK nvm apparently the bug is just when you try to toggle vr in exclusive fullscreen. I switched to windowed and it worked. But then my mouse would click on other windows? So I set it back to fullscreen after toggling it.
Holy fuck it rules in VR, though. Elevates it from serviceable, I-want-to-like-this to killer app.
The money squeezes in this one are interesting, you can buy outfits for your pilot, or buy certain appearances (want to be a female Twilek? be prepared to lay out the cash), and there’s three separate kinds of flair for your cockpit.
i think if you think about it a lot of spaceship dogfight casualties would really just be guys whos xwings got incapacitated after being grazed by a lazer or a rock or whatever and it unhooked some wiring and everything just shut down and they suffocated or froze to death floating alone
I’m so confused and disoriented while I play this game. I need to train my brain like Ender’s. I have no intuition about how to spot targets, determine how close they are to me, any sense of awareness about my visibility to others who may be behind me… I’d love to develop those skills tho. I think it’s cool that a game is really demanding a lot out of my spacial reasoning abilities.
