Star Wars: Squadrons

Star Wars: Squadrons' single-player campaign tells an entertaining story, while its flight controls hit a sweet spot between accessibility and nuance – and it's made even better by VR and HOTAS support.

Involved flight mechanics and the pure joys of dogfighting fill Star Wars: Squadrons with plenty of highlights, even if its campaign and multiplayer experiences can leave you wanting.

An immersive space sim that's dazzling in VR, Squadrons provides an exhilarating multiplayer experience, even if the story feels pedestrian.

Star Wars: Squadrons delivers on great dogfighting, even when its campaign doesn't live up to its full potential.

From inside my HTC Vive Pro, I feel totally immersed in the action. I'm surrounded by cockpits that look just like they do in the classic films. My ears are filled with familiar Star Wars sounds that I can immediately recognize, and Squadrons' excellent binaural audio brings it to life all around me. I can look in any direction, moving my head as fast as I want without the game struggling to keep up with me. Even while boosting, rolling, and turning to keep a bead on other players during multiplayer, I always felt in control.

Star Wars: Squadrons offers an exhilarating take on dogfighting in a galaxy far, far away, which helps elevate a functional single-player story and provides a strong foundation for a focused multiplayer experience.

The single-player campaign teaches you the ropes, but achieves little else. Multiplayer is always fun and is exactly what it needs to be to wow Star Wars fans

Ever wanted to be an X-Wing pilot? Playing this game immersively with VR is the closest yet to being in the cockpit, flying missions on both sides of the galactic divide

The central experience – of being a pilot in a Star Wars – is masterfully crafted, and I can’t find much to fault with it. Squadrons is probably the most fun I’ve had with any piece of Star Wars media since my teens, in fact, and it frequently invokes a joy I haven’t felt since playing TIE Fighter in 1995.

Squadrons feels like more than the sum of its parts. Most importantly, it does exactly what it set out to do – and does it very well indeed. It’s EA’s smallest-scale console Star Wars title yet – but also its best