You can also set the degree of the simulation and customise controls. You can pilot your fighter via mouse-and-keyboard, gamepad or joystick, with an array of UI aids that you can switch on or off depending on your skill level. Unfortunately it also removes some tension from the game, as your squad-mates are all essential characters and can't die mid-mission. There's no great shakes here - the game's writing is functional at best - but it's a nice touch and a solid growth from the older games where your team-mates had no development whatsoever. You can talk to your fellow pilots during mission briefings and on the hanger deck to get some more insight on the story and the objectives. Unlike the X-Wing games, there's a huge focus on your wingmen and squad mates, which both Vanguard and Titan squadrons having an interesting roster of new characters, each with their own backstory and personality. It does have some weaknesses, but it gets much closer to the highs of the X-Wing series than most people expected.Īs with the X-Wing series, you follow a series of missions (fourteen plus a super-sized prologue, which the game counts as two different missions) which tell a story.
The game has even launched at around half the price of a normal, new release in 2020. It consists of a single-player campaign and two multiplayer modes, with absolutely no microtransactions of any kind. Much to everyone's surprise, Squadrons is actually a very solid game. With EA's reputation for filling their games with different ways of draining money from players, there was a fear Squadrons would end up disappointing. EA's highly promising 2013 development deal with Lucasfilm to deliver multiple Star Wars games had delivered exactly three major games, the so-so multiplayer shooters Battlefront and Battlefront II, which were fun but lacking much depth ( Battlefront II did come with a very short single-player story campaign), and the very solid Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. When EA confirmed earlier this year they were making a spiritual successor to that series, under the name Star Wars: Squadrons, there was widespread scepticism. In fact, the entire space combat genre fell off a cliff that year, with Freespace 2 also bombing despite being arguably the greatest game ever made of that type.
Unfortunately X-Wing Alliance's quality was not rewarded by strong sales. The X-Wing series had fantastic graphics (for the time), superb gameplay that matched accessibility with tactical depth and told pretty good stories in the Star Wars setting, and was going from strength to strength. If you'd told me than that it would take almost twenty-two years to get a follow-up I'd have flat-out disbelieved you. Back in February 1999 I eagerly queued up to buy X-Wing Alliance, the fourth game in Lawrence Holland and Totally Games' X-Wing series.
0 kommentar(er)
