Star Wars Squadrons.

 I was really excited for this game.  Back in the day I LOVED X-wing, Tie Fighter, X-wing vs. Tie Fighter, and the rogue squadron games.  I really enjoyed the flight sim, space combat gameplay in the Star Wars universe, usually with at least a decent story to go along with it, oftentimes a pretty good story.  I mean, have you played Rogue Squadron 3: Rebel Strike?  That game has an amazing story, that fit really well into the original trilogy, and fun and challenging gameplay.  The opening level where you have to defend the Yavin 4 base while the Empire is bombarding the crap out of it in retaliation for the destruction of the Death Star was so good that i instantly fell in love with that game.

Anyway, I really like the Star Wars flying sim games.  They're fun, and let me live out my childhood fantasies of being Luke Skywalker.  Childish?  Yeah.  But, I mean, I was a child.  So sue me.  So, I actually preordered this one.  The trailers made it look great.  EA had finally made an okay Star Wars game in Jedi: Fallen Order last year, and I was optimistic that this game would be at least decent.

Yeah.  No.  It was not.

So, I play games for the story.  I DO NOT care about online multiplayer AT ALL.  I don't like people.  I might even go so far as saying I hate people, in general, as a concept.  My idea of heaven is being alone, forever, without having to interact with another human being for the rest of eternity.  I don't want to have to deal with people.  Dealing with people is extremely stressful for me.  I have anxiety attacks just thinking about it.  I will go ridiculously out of my way just to avoid having to interact with people in my daily life.  I play games to relax after a stressful day of having to deal with people.  I don't want to have to deal with people while I'm trying to relax.  So that aspect of this game will never appeal to me in any way.  I expected at least a so-so story mode.  Even with such a low bar, I still managed to be disappointed in it.

The story mode of this game is basically just an extended tutorial for the multiplayer side of things.  The game never actually shuts up and just lets you play it and figure things out on your own.  The story is bland and uninteresting.  The characters are either very flat, very annoying, or very unlikable.  And the gameplay itself is kind of boring, really, and feels copy and pasted from Battlefront 2 with a few minor bells and whistles added to it.  The graphics are decent, and the music is all right.  But graphics are not everything.  My all-time favorite video game is 16-bit.  The story mode of this game feels a lot like the story campaign of Battlefront 2.  It's just not told very well, or very interestingly.  It's lazy, boring, full of bad or nonsensical writing.  And the characters are just grating.  I would not be surprised at all if you told me that the same person or team wrote the story campaigns of both games.  This was NOT a story that needed to be told, and, when you get right down to it, it was barely even a story at all.  This game feels like it was just slapped together in a few months as a cheap cash grab.

 

I did attempt to play the multiplayer mode once, and I just felt like there was no overall point to it.  It's just playing the game for the sake of the gameplay, which, in my opinion, wasn't all that great to begin with.

Unless you REALLY want an online multiplayer flight sim space combat game, don't bother.  It is only $40, but I'd say the actual game content and quality is more on the level of a $15 indie game off Steam.  Not worth the price.