Starts with a low budget but endearing opening cinematic, which transitions into a mandatory 46 page EULA and if that’s not a great example for what the game ends up being, I don’t know what is. There’s an interesting game here, but it’s buried behind so much poorly done VR talking head exposition and a non-sense story that I’m going to forget nearly immediately after I delete the game. True, this is a ‘made for multiplayer’ game, but I’m not brave enough to even play a few matches, I can see that if I spend about 20 hours playing a single type of fighter that I might get good enough, but I just don’t have that kind of time to invest. I say “a single type” because you get to play both sides of the story here, the New Republic and Imperials, and each side has 5 or 6 ships that you can fly, all of them with different control layouts, and all of those layouts with customizable loadouts, so what works in mission 2 doesn’t work in mission 3, and hope you’re not too attached to those missiles you used in your last mission, because they’re not available for the next one! The constant back and forth in the story gave me whiplash and I don’t think I could tell you a single character’s name, with the exception of Hera Syndulla, a character from one of the many TV shows.
It wasn’t until I was halfway through the game that I realized that you could even boost your fighter, then drift it to turn around quickly. The final mission I was still getting popups explaining new abilities that I just picked up.
It may sound like I’m ragging on the game a bit, and while I’m not necessarily happy with my experiences, it’s still a gorgeous game with a fantastic soundtrack and you really do get to sit in and fly around in some of the coolest starfighters in science fiction, I just wish the story made more sense and the POV stayed with one side or the others. I honestly don’t think i’ve ever wanted to play as child killing Imperials, but between Star Wars Battlefront 2 and Squadrons, I think I’ve murdered thousands, if not millions of innocent people.
I enjoyed the game on PSVR. I played X-wing and Tie-fighter to absolute death when I was a kid and this is the closest I’ve got to that sort of feeling. In fact, I had a blast tooling around in the single-player campaign, which is too short but the missions are fun. I never really intended to play the multi-player – I always get curb-stomped playing against real people. Or 15 yr olds, whatever.
However, I think you’re dead right on the storyline talking heads – too many, too long and they don’t add much. And the fact I’ve not picked it up again since probably says a lot.
Worth picking up in a bargain bin for a fun couple of evenings single player entertainment though, I reckon.
I think I would have been much happier if it was all from one POV and all the ships had the same control schema, and had a better control layout, I had to spend about 30 minutes remapping buttons, then finding out that the way that I had them wouldn’t work for specific parts of specific missions.
I should point out, it’s on GamePass now, so I still recommend checking it out.