I Can't Believe EA Made This (Star Wars Squadrons Review) -

 this video is brought to you by squarespace stick around to the end of the video for a special offer they're making available through my channel star wars squadrons is so weird because it's an ea game that has both a single player campaign and a multiplayer mode and it has full hotas and vr support on pc and ps4 and there's no micro transactions and this thing sells for like 40 us dollars or 50 australian dollars which is literally half the price of a full price game this many features that cheap no micro transactions from ea before playing my brain was like it's a trap but no ea totally delivered on almost every single promise i've had so much fun with this video game like wow i cannot believe how much i have enjoyed it i can't believe i got this thing for 50 australian bucks from ea but there is a catch when i say 50 bucks i'm kind of not giving you the full picture and that's because there's really three different ways to play this game and each of them come with their own price tag the bottom tier is just playing this with a straight controller through your tv that's good but not great the next tier is playing it with a hotas setup you know the joystick and the throttle that seriously elevates the experience as it tidies up what is a very crowde control scheme when you're playing it with just a controller and it also just feels [ __ ] cool but the triple s tier way to play this game is with a hotes setup and a vr headset through either a pc or a ps4 at that point this game is [ __ ] amazing like holy [ __ ] these are some of the best most immersive star wars thrills i've ever had it made me feel like i was playing rogue squadron again for the first time on the nintendo 64. just this overall excitement and feeling like yes i am a star pilot yes i will bring down the empire single-handedly i mean the rush that you feel when you swing around hard redirect your shield energy all front speed up for your attack run fire off a volley of lasers and missiles and then look over your shoulder at the star destroyer beneath you dude this is so [ __ ] cool this is where the fun begins but of course very few people get to experience the game in this way so in this review we're gonna review it through all three lenses because that's actually how i played it i played about a third of it with a controller i played about a third of it with hotas and no vr and i played a third of it with hotas and vr and then i played some multiplayer as well we'll talk about how all of it works as well as have a good look at things like the campaign the story the performance and other stuff bottom line this is a very solid star wars game no matter how you're playing it but if you've got the right setup this [ __ ] is unmissable star wars squadrons is an arcade fly in the same tradition as pretty much every star wars fly that's come before it don't expect super realistic or demanding controls or physics expect something fun and easily accessible the game is divided in two one part being a single player story driven campaign and the other being a multiplayer game that you can play solo if you wish but it's primarily played through online matchmaking the game is set just after the fall of the empire at endor and it's called squadrons plural because the game is actually the tale of two squadrons the new republic's vanguard squadron and the empire's titan squadron they're longtime rivals who have sparred in the past but now they're on a direct collision course as the new republic seeks to build its own super weapon to stand up to the might of the remaining imperial forces over roughly 10 hours and 16 missions you'll swap back and forth between two perspectives in one mission defending the starhawk superweapon and in the next trying to blow it into space dust in a story that leans on plenty of the tropes we've seen before from star wars but that doesn't make them any less enjoyable this time around you'll begin your journey in character customization which offers a very modest collection of tweakable options but it's enough to get the job done later on you'll be able to customize things such as their helmet and their clothes and stuff like that but that's only unlockable through multiplayer the opening missions get you to grips with the basics of controls and introduce you to the cast of characters there's an imperial commander whose sudden defection sets the tone for events creating a personal rivalry between titan and vanguard squadron that plays out in mission dialogue but mostly in cut scenes and back in the hangars the hangars are where you start to feel some of the budget constraints of this title kicking in rather than being able to walk around freely and explore your feet are firmly planted with the option to just look around and click on things such as ship customization or npcs to initiate dialogue it's a somewhat jarring restriction that feels unnecessary since it couldn't have been that much work to make these very small spaces fully realized environments that could be freely explored i think it lends credence to the idea that this game was originally built as a vr game exclusively and then converted to also have a non-vr option since this sort of limited movement in internal spaces is quite common within the vr genre as for people that you're speaking to when the story that unfolds i'd say it's pretty textbook star wars fair that we've seen dozens of times before and that's either going to make you really happy or perhaps disappoint you on the plus side this is definitely tight concise authentic star wars full of ragtag ruffians with hearts of gold imperial defectors and gallant commanders all who square off against snarling imperials who have no lack of enthusiasm when it comes to telling you just how much they enjoy killing people the empire is still very much the empire as the organization hasn't broken down yet and the new republic is still very much the rebel alliance because the odds are always stacked sky-high against them it's a story that feels extremely familiar because it is but in a franchise where familiar was thrown completely out the window with the new trilogy squadrons can feel like comfort food for me i didn't love it because i'd sort of seen this story so many times before or something similar to it it kind of just washed over me and it really just made me pissed off at the new trilogy we could have had an entire generation of video games exploring these new characters these new worlds playing out their best and most exciting moments on the silver screen in our own consoles and pcs instead the new trilogy was such a colossal failure that even a game like this set after the events of return of the jedi steers clear of anything we saw in those horrid movies the new trilogy is utterly cursed and every new video game that releases that gives them a wide berth is just another reminder of how much star wars fans were let down by this gigantic war of egos played out on movie screens anyway i digress squadron 16 missions are always set in space unlike row squadron or battlefront 2 there are no ground-based missions at all which is a huge missed opportunity because despite squadron's best efforts missions start to feel a little samey after a while there's always a few capital ships to blow up a whole lot of fighters to bring down and a few unique mission objectives thrown in to spice things up some ground missions would have gone a long way towards pacing the adventure mixing large-scale space battles with the more intimate bombing and stealth missions that we've seen from other games still squadrons does the best it can with what it has and it consistently does a solid job at times it does a fantastic job one mission sees me arming a minefield in preparation for a rebel convoy  detonating them as enemy corvettes get close enough another mission sees me flying inside the gizzards of a capital ship to take out its tractor beam before i'm heated out there by the force  of the explosion like i said you've seen this before it's good and i didn't dislike any of the missions but they do tend to meld together a little bit i think a really good comparison to give this some context is ace combat a game i reviewed last year now this is a game with some phenomenal mission design because each mission felt like its own puzzle to be solved you had to bring exactly the right weapons be in the right place at the right time really listen to the mission calls and respond to them prioritize your targets fight hard and never lose focus squadron's missions are far less objective driven meaning that you can typically just focus on shooting down as many ships as possible and kind of doing whatever you like and you'll generally be fine it's accessible but i think people really committed to the genre will likely be looking for a little more depth this brings us to the most important part the flying and the combat now there are eight ships available in the game for republic and for empire and they're roughly analogous to each other so your x-wing is your tie fighter and your a-wing as your interceptor and your y-wing is your thai bomber and your u-wing is i don't know what this is called it looks like a mini darth maul ship each ship carves out its own unique place in your arsenal owing to its capabilities  speed maneuverability firepower  defensive capability and utility the u-wing is interesting because it actually lets you buff your allies with additional shields or disable enemy fighters so they're easier targets for your teammates these role identities are further deepened by your ability to customize each of these you can equip different lasers with different damage profiles and rates of fire you can equip a wide variety of secondary equipment focusing on defense or dog fighting or assaulting capital ships and you can change up your shields or your armor or your engines gaining benefits in some aspects while  always trading away others during the single player side of the game these choices are really just about flair and freedom of choice because  pretty much anything will work but in multiplayer this flexibility allows you to focus on your role in the squad which we'll come back to later when it comes to flying squadron serves up some very crisp flying mechanics but there are some caveats to that generally speaking each ship has its own feel convincingly translating the different speed and maneuverability profiles into real life handling i came to appreciate the slight sluggishness that i felt when i piloted the x-wing since it meant i was carrying more armor than i did when i was flying an a-wing that sort of immediate connection between stats and actual feel isn't easy to create so hats off to ea for nailing that one while responsiveness and authenticity is there i do think the game is missing a sense of speed and this might be down to the lack of a third person perspective you might have noticed that all the footage so far has been in the first person cockpit view and there's a reason for that that's the only view available ea said they did this to avoid players getting a competitive advantage in pvp but this is cold comfort given that a lot of players are going to be playing this for the campaign only and it would have improved the experience to have had the choice for comparison's sake here's star wars battlefront 2 footage where you can see how much third person perspective just makes everything feel like it's happening faster maybe it is happening faster i don't know either way squadrons just feels a little on the slow side eve when you're firing on all cylinder that's probably a good thing to talk about next how to fire on all cylinders because yeah that's a thing here one of the most impressive features of squadrons is how much control you have over your ship's systems you can direct power to your engines your shields your weapons you can control whether your shield energy is balanced or directed to the front or the back giving you flexibility to prepare for an aggressive buzzing while literally covering your arse as you make your escape there's even some layering to these systems so if you're on the empire side you can direct power to your lasers and then double down on that with even more power giving you some huge damage potential if you're willing to give up the speed and maneuverability to do it in the campaign you don't really need to engage a lot of these systems unless you're playing on the harder difficulties but doing so is just so much fun and so rewarding given how often you're attacking capital ships or crossing great distances being able to redirect power and shields to where they're needed is both efficient and extremely immersive there's also a lot of work that's been put into ui you have buttons to cycle through targets target something directly in front of you double pressing it targets the last enemy that shot you so you can fight back against someone on your tail there's a sub menu that lets you control which targets get selected when you press the auto target buttons it takes some getting used to but when you do you'll appreciate how much information the ui is able to give you if you use it properly with so much control over your ship and the ui the ps4 and xbox controllers struggle to keep up button mapping does the best it can but it feels really crowded like putting your roll and the throttle on the left analog stick or mapping your weapon shields and engine toggle to your d-pad mean that you lose control over both your roll and your speed when you want to change them since you have to take your thumb off the analog stick it sounds like minor nitpicking but given how often you're  using all of these features the cramped nature of the control scheme does make itself felt pretty quickly this is where we start to get into the part about the hotas now i switched to hotas after about mission five and it was like playing a different game i used the thrustmaster t flight hotas for pc and ps4 giving me an independent throttle to control speed a rotation on the stick to control my roll and a d-pad on the joystick allowing me to switch around my engines and weapons without ever losing control of anything for even a split second immediately this setup solved my biggest frustration with the game's controls and it just felt like like a new game just the game just felt like it had more room to breathe i felt so much more in command of my ship's handling and i was pulling off maneuvers that i wouldn't have had the confidence to execute with a controller i mean i probably could have had i practiced but everything flowed so much more naturally with a stick in hand after each mission loads there's a brief window where you're in the cockpit view but you don't yet have control of your ship and your pilot sort of stretches their fingers as if to get ready that moment straight after that when i gained control of the ship i [ __ ] loved that moment when i was playing with a hotas setup and i never got tired of it now i was doing this on a ps4 pro and there's one very important caveat here and that's that there's currently a major issue with hotas setups on pc where a massive dead zone makes it borderline unplayable for those people it's a software thing so it can and will be patched with time but for now on pc if you're planning on playing this with hotas just don't just wait until it's patched because right now it's straight up does not work but as i said there's one more layer to enjoying this game and that layer is vr as i was playing this on a ps4 pro i was of course using the psvr headset but if you're on the pc you can use pretty much any headset and oh my god this game isjust [ __ ] awesome when you're playing it in vr i mean even the hanger sequences when you're in them and you're just staring up at this gigantic tie fighter doctor or you're in a briefing with your commander and you can look around the bridge and just soak up what it feels to be like on an imperial flight deck you can look around in non-vr of course but it's just 10 times better in vr that's nothing compared to the experience of flying though the minute you load in and look around your cockpit and see all the lights and panels and the still chassis of the tie fighter like you're flying in some big flying billiard ball it's just i loved it so much when it comes to the combat it actually took me a while to really get the hang of flying in vr like this i kind of didn't move my head while i was playing which sounds really dumb but it's true because i'd spent the first 10 missions limited by the narrow cockpit view my brain didn't really cotton on to the fact that i could look left and right and up and down and be able to see things while doing it when i did get the hang of it it was just amazing like just looking out my window at star destroyers as i flew past them or tracking a target as it went over my head or glancing left or right to find an escape route when i was being tailed the sheer immersion of these littleglances and moments and decision making and i was all such a rush i've played pretty much every star wars flight game going all the way back to x-wing and tie fighter mind you while i don't think this has the compelling mission design that a lot of those games had and i don't think it has the same blistering speed and visual splendor of battlefront 2 this is the best experience i've ever had in star wars cockpit if you have this setup and i know it's really expensive but if you have it and you like star wars this is a must

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the play half of this game is a multiplayer pvp experience well not quite there's some single player baked into that but we'll come to that first up battles are 5v5 supported by in-game matchmaking you get matched in with a squad and you select your ship customize it and then you shove off already there's a lot of opportunity here for squad play since you can see which fighter each of your squad members are bringing to the fight it's almost like roll selection in a moba and here you can choose to bring the support ship if your squad hasn't got one or you can equip your interceptor with more weapons suited to capital ship offensives if it looks like your squad is light on heavy ordnance you can also switch ships and loadouts while you're respawning after death so there's a lot of strategic flex built into this since you may want to bring a different fighter if it looks like the current squad isn't getting the job done there are two modes in squadron's multiplayer repertoire dogfight and capital ships dogfights are exactly what you think they are 5v5 battles in the stars where each team needs to reach 20 kills before the other team does respawns are quick the battlefield is small and the whole thing is generally over in about 10 minutes or so while this mode is simple i still found it to be really fun most of the levels are set in tiny asteroid fields or space stations or debris fields so there's a big focus on maneuvering through tight spaces to lose your opponent or to stay on their tail i kind of like the chasing more than i like the shooting specifically because i had so much control over my ship's systems that i could combine my own maneuvers with the ship's speed settings and the directions of my shield and the ui targeting system just really [ __ ] fly you know like just nerd out and fly my ass off to either save it or to blow up someone else's i really love that [ __ ] the other game mode is vastly more interesting but it's a lot more time demanding it's called capital ships and it can be played either solo against bots or against actual opponents in a ranked mode here your job is to bring downenemy capital ships standing between you and that goal are some smaller and medium-sized ships which serve as objectives as well as the enemy squadron of fire fighters the entire thing is governed by a morale meter at the top get lots of kills on the enemy or bring down their bigger ships to gain morale moving the engagement line forward allowing you to engage more of their bigger targets get too close to those targets without the engagement line being in your favor and you'll almost immediately be targeted and killed by heavy fire it's a proper space battle with objectives leading to bigger objectives at the end and it's fantastic though it's not without its problems one issue is that the engagement line moves back and forth pretty quickly depending on how things are going but you don't really get any notice that that's happening and no time to clear out so you're fighting and then everything's going great and you're on the offensive and all of a sudden the line shifts and then you just get immediately blown up by one of the enemy ships these skirmishes are also quite long running upwards of 30 minutes now i don't have a problem with that i think it's great in fact because it allows for some pretty thrilling back and forward but those looking for something more strategic than dogfights but they don't have a full 30 minutes available for each round will find themselves out of luck i mean 30 minutes is a long time for a pvp battle and in almost every match i've played someone has left and they haven't been replaced making for some really dull 4v5s the biggest thing is just how unlevel the playing field is with the inclusion of things like hotas and vr since yeah you can play the multiplayer modes with these things against people who are just using a controller now controller folk they'll do just fine but there's no question that they are at a disadvantage the stick and the headset aren't just for immersion's sake playing in this way materially changes the experience i can do things that i can't do in a non-hotass non-vr setup yeah there's free look mode which i can use with the controller but i lose control of my ship when i'm using it so it's just not the same here i can see things my enemies can't see i can follow them more easily i can maneuver more easily i have access to all of my ship's systems more readily i just have a straight up advantage over everybody else and that doesn't make me god mode or anything but it's something to keep in mind for anyone who's planning to invest in this game for the longer term since yeah there's a ranked mode and people tend to  get pretty serious whenever there's a rank mode involved

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i played squadrons on the ps4 pro where i had excellent performance right the way through though there were a few bugs most notably when you're using a hotas setup the controller would disconnect and when you reconnected it the screen was stuck you literally had to restart the game to fix this the workaround for this is to ensure that the ps4 controller is powered off before you boot up the game and boot it up with your hotas annoying but it works on the pc i've already spoken about the hotas dead zone issue but there are also widespread reports of very poor performance and high cpu gpu usage when playing it feels like this is pretty much good to go on a console but not quite finished on pc if you're checking it out on pc be sure to check the latest patch details before jumping in those caveats aside i am a little bit astounded by this product like i said it's from ea and yet it has a solid single player campaign a great multiplayer mode with no micro transactions hotas support that works on console at least not pc at the moment and it has vr support it's honestly one of the best star wars games i have played now that's not a huge bar since most of them are pretty crap but some of them are pretty fantastic and i think this earns its place in at least the top 10 maybe even the top five if you have the setup that i have the hotas and the vr headset without that it's still a very solid title that i recommend to you you're going to enjoy yourself so long as your expectations are in the right place but with hotas and vr buy this game buy it right now well not on pc buy it later but but buy it this is awesome i loved it and good job ea that's weird if you've got a blog or a hobby or a business idea that you want to take to the next level then squarespace is your best bet squarespace offers the world's best set of custom website design tools allowing absolute beginners to immediately begin creating professional looking websites they don't just look good either they have almost everything your website will need for both you and the people viewing it stuff like appointment scheduling for clients or traffic overviews so you can see how many people are visiting your site you can schedule posts so that you can put future content in the pipeline and you can even build a comment section so you can begin building an online community head to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch your idea go to squarespace.com forward slash skillup to get 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain thanks to squarespace for sponsoring the video and thank you for watching it thanks for watching my video if you liked it give it a thumbs up if you didn't give it a thumbs down so i know to do better for next time if you enjoyed yourself consider subscribing and if you really enjoyed yourself maybe consider hitting that notification bell so you never miss a video you can see my patrons here on the left they're awesome they're amazing if you want to join them check out my patreon page thank yo again i'll see you next time