I’m playing this partly because I got it for free and partly to give my old joystick, a cheap Logitech Extreme 3D Pro, a workout. It’s been ages since I last pulled it out of storage and I wasn’t sure if it still worked. Plus it’s always fun to relive old memories of playing X-Wing and I was one of the unfortunates who never got around to playing TIE Fighter. Back then I didn’t own a joystick either so being able to fly a Star Wars starfighter with one sounds like fun! This is also really a multiplayer focused game but as usual I will only play the single-player story mode and in any case, I don’t think the multiplayer scene for this title ever really took off.

The campaign includes missions for both the Galactic Empire and the New Republic, flying as a pilot for Titan Squadron for the former and Vanguard Squadron for the latter. The prologue takes place during the Rebellion Era but most of the missions take place after the Battle of Endor. The player character for both sets of missions is unnamed and mute so the central character in the story is Lindon Javes, an Imperial Navy Captain who defected to the Rebel Alliance. Amusingly this time around, it’s the New Republic who is developing a superweapon, a massive battleship named Starhawk constructed from the parts of stolen Imperial Star Destroyers. Vanguard Squadron’s missions are all about working under Javes in completing and deploying the Starhawk. Meanwhile Captain Terisa Kerrill on the Imperial is a former protégé of Javes’ who wants to kill him and destroy the Starhawk. The other members of both both squadrons are fully developed characters with names and voices. You get to speak to them in between missions to get snippets of their personal stories. However the story is entirely linear and there are no decisions for the player to make. The only difference you can make is to successfully complete some of the optional objectives during missions.

The single-player story is quite short and at the default difficulty level, isn’t very challenging either. The optional objectives can be tough to achieve but the game really holds your hand as you go about the mission. Your squadron wingmates are all invincible and you’re always told to follow a particular wingmate to get to exactly where you need to be for every stage of a mission. You’ll even be topped up on consumables like missiles, bombs and hull repair kits every once in a while by a wingmate. If you need to, you can return to your mothership for a full heal or switch fighters in many missions. It’s a very forgiving single-player experience and a far cry for those who remember the punishing difficulty of the old X-Wing series of games. It can be frustrating that your wingmates can help watch your back but you’re the one who has to accomplish all of the primary mission objectives. It’s about what you’d expect from a story-focused single-player game that is more about delivering a cinematic experience than being a realistic starfighter simulator.

I always knew not to expect this to be realistic but this still surprised me by how arcadey it felt. The flight model has nothing whatsoever to do with how real planes work and felt really weird to me after playing Elite: Dangerous. You’re expected to divert power between components but really you just want to maximize power in whatever it is you’re using at the moment so it’s easy to understand. You have the option to temporarily boost your speed to get out of trouble and it’s very powerful. But combined with the ability to drift in space, it makes it feel even less like you’re really flying a starfighter. One cool change is that the battles no longer take place in empty space but in debris fields and around asteroids and nebulae. This means you can weave your starfighter around obstacles, use pieces of debris or even a friendly capital ship as cover from missiles and the like. The battlefield is kind of small however and you’ll be warned if you are leaving the bounded area. The game is built around squadron level engagements so there won’t be giant fleet battles with dozens of ships on each side.

The story works well enough but there’s really no crossover with anything else in the Star Wars canon with the exception of a guest appearance by Wedge Antilles. My favorite part is that you get to see things from the Empire’s point of view and so your fellow pilots are fighting for law and the proper order of the galaxy. It’s also amazing that you get to look around the insides of the hangars and briefing rooms. It adds nothing to the gameplay however and it’s completely optional. It doesn’t seem to me like a good use of the developer’s resources and it’s not like you actually get to walk around inside a Star Destroyer but I guess you need this kind of ultra high production values to qualify for being a Star Wars game.

I suppose in the end, this game achieves what it set out to do well enough: evoke what it feels like to fly a starfighter in a Star Wars movie. You get to fly around destroying enemy fighters, swoop across the hulls of capital ships, do crazy U-turns in space like in the newest trilogy and even experience a very shallow representation of the familiar trench run. The single player campaign gives you a small taste of each of the fighters for each side except for a couple that were added in a later update. The characters say the things that you expect them to say and it’s even kind of cool to see that the New Republic is roughly on parity with the remnants of the Galactic Empire and acts like it.

It’s very much not a simulator however and the story is too short to achieve any kind of real familiarity with each fighter. In order to achieve parity for multiplayer fairness, they even make some odd design choices. So the Tie Interceptor here is the Empire’s equivalent of the A-Wing which just seems wrong to me. This is so short and easy that at least it never overstays its welcome but by the end I ended up really missing the old X-Wing games. Maybe it’s much better in VR or in multiplayer as intended, but in single-player, this is like a prettified guided tour of all of the features instead of a complete game experience.