Part of that comes down to its cast of interesting characters, primarily made up of your squads on either side of the conflict. It’s very cool, and developer Motive Studios continues to prove it knows how to make a game fit seamlessly into the Star Wars universe. The way it weaves the stories of two rival squadrons together sets up clever scenarios, sometimes letting you spring ambushes on your other half only to have the next mission swap perspectives so you can deal with the aftermath of your own actions. The campaign spends its roughly seven-hour run of missions jumping between the dueling perspectives of a crumbling Empire and a freshly formed New Republic just after the events of Return of the Jedi. Things like that make flight more engaging and give good pilots a chance to shine without requiring you to literally learn how to fly a spaceship in order to play. You can, for the most part, just pick up a controller and start chasing down enemy ships – but there’s also a nuance to adjusting your throttle for better turning, swapping power between engines, weapons, and shields in the style of the grand old X-Wing games, and countering missile locks. Squadrons has found a sweet spot between the point-and-shoot simplicity of the classic Rogue Squadron series and the insanely detailed simulation of Elite: Dangerous.

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