Star Wars: Squadrons (2020) (PC, Steam VR) (Motive Studios)
0I've never really understood the appeal of combat flight simulators. Whether featuring airplanes or their science fiction equivalents, the act of circling around enemy targets in a big empty space while trying to line up shots from a distance just doesn't feel very exciting to me. While I do have some fond feelings for genre classics such as Star Wars: Tie Figher or Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, that is mostly related to their absorbing storytelling and cutscenes - excellent pixel art in the former and equally fabulous FMV in the latter - rather than to the actual gameplay itself.
Star Wars: Squadrons is a mid-priced combat simulator which clearly wants to be a spiritual successor to the aforementioned Lucasarts titles from the 1990s. Powered by EA's ubiquitous Frostbite engine, Squadrons sure delivers some good-looking spaceships for the player to pilot, shoot at and/or fly dangerously close to. While the action itself doesn't deviate much from the formula established over 20 years ago (and why would it, given that this is such a nostalgia-driven release overall?), the support for VR headsets on both PC and PS4 is certainly a welcome addition. As has often been mentioned, cockpit-based games are naturally well-suited for virtual reality and don't require much actual changes to the gameplay structure and controls in order to make the transition from 2D to 3D smoothly. I doubt I'll be spending much time with Squadrons in the long run, but just the experience of sitting down in an X-Wing in VR and oogle its many blinking lights and superfluous knobs was probably worth the price of admission...