it's a nice world to be in. inventory management is a loathsome concept though. part of the fun is seeing how all these mechanics interact but then you see people sharing them on twitter and it's like. well. ok. thanks for telling me. and then you just have this game. idk!

it's just nice. i like it in speedruns where you jump off a cliff and bop a momplin on the noggin with your shield and blast off at 50000mph faster than the game can load.

i gave it 4 stars but actually it's more like 3.5. whatever.

it's nice

i suck fucking shit at this game. teenagers from both sides of the atlantic constantly hurl homophobic slurs my way.

but you can theoretically do anything you want with any hero and once upon a time when a game went on too long the map would literally start to break and you'd get random particle effects flying around for some reason.

5 stars

The main plot is unremarkable and the characters have seeds of interesting stories in them but are otherwise thin, and not helped by wooden animation and inconsistent voice acting. It would have been less jarring to have 2D character portraits, and frankly more interesting to look at. There's a laudable attempt at diversity within the cast, but the Asian pilot, with a throwaway line about his husband, is still working for the Galactic Empire - whose governing ideology is one of human supremacy. This is rarely explicitly stated in media outside of the pre-Disney books, and I'm not surprised to see it elided again, but this had potential for more adventurous writing than "gay people of colour can do war crimes, too, in a universe where the homophobias and racisms of the real world don't exist".

I actually did enjoy the overall pacing, and chatting to people between missions in the hangar and ready room. The engine itself seems like a great foundation for story-telling! I would love to see what modders could do with this, but this is an EA joint so expectations are sadly low.

I don't think I can really review the piloting as I'd like because I don't have a joystick. It was certainly playable with a gamepad. However, the control binding menus were very robust, including the Laser/Shields/Engine distribution keys - I think it's quite clear a lot of people from the X-Wing vs TIE Fighters days were listened to it, with good effect.

I've never been much for deathmatch/dogfights, so I've mostly played the Fleet Battles mode, in which there is a sort of soft-coded ebb/tide of territory based on your team's performance, and victory is defined by taking out the capital ships rather than First To X Kills. Did I play well? Did I know what I was doing? Did I research strategies? I did none of these things and I still had a good time.

I was also pleasantly surprised that they added custom servers, with the ability to make granular changes to the game (e.g.damage/health for both starfighters and capital ships). Now go the whole hog and let us trigger serverwide soundboards with allchat commands.

Overall, as much as they could with a relatively niche genre within a multi-billion dollar IP, the developers really have tried to avoid making something with barebones features and a sterile matchmaking environment, and their update posts give me the impression they want to maintain it and create something longlasting. It's a good video game I should pick it up again actually. They have B-wings now! B-wings!!!

i love to hit things with a sword, and i love a horrid little gremlin who makes the :twisted: face.

also i cried at the end.

now my fav zelda (above OoT and BotW)