Star Wars: Battlefront's Fighter Squadron Mode is the X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter Comeback We've Been Waiting For
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Tuesday, August 18, 2015
To this day, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter is one of the most fondly remembered Star Wars games, and soon its spirit will live on in Star Wars: Battlefront's Fighter Squadron mode. It's all fairly self-explanatory stuff, as the Rebel Alliance and Galactic Empire do battle in the skies above Battlefront's multitude of planets, reliving all of your favourite Star Wars dogfighting moments, even if these don't happen to take place among the stars. You'll soon find that this really doesn't matter.
Piloting an X-wing or a TIE fighter can take a little getting used to at first, thanks to what initially seems like a slightly unorthodox control system, but in no time you'll be flying like a seasoned member of Rogue Squadron. Taking the action to the clouds above the lava planet of Sullust (mentioned in Return of the Jedi, but never seen before), the sky is filled with TIE fighters, TIE interceptors, X-wings and A-wings, with player-controlled units joined by AI pilots. Shoot down AI-controlled enemies, and you'll score less than you would for shooting down an actual human player, but with the score limit set to 200, every little helps.
Dogfights generally consist of tailing an enemy, lining them up in your crosshairs and doling out some damage with your laser cannons, before establishing a lock-on to unleash your torpedoes. You can switch between cockpit and outside views on-the-fly, while the left stick controls the ratio of weapon power to thrust, meaning the slower you go, the greater the impact of your cannon fire and torpedoes, while travelling at full speed dampens your weapons' efficacy.
Each ship has its own unique ability too, with Rebel fighters able to deploy a shield when things get a little too heated, whereas Imperial ships can outrun and outmanoeuvre opponents with a handy speed boost. Both ships can also make evasive manoeuvres in an effort to shake tailing enemies or a torpedo lock, tapping in the corresponding direction on the d-pad.
Like Battlefront's ground-based skirmishes, you'll find pickups in Fighter Squadron too, with one shortening the cooldown on your missiles and the other repairing any damage to your ship. Most of these pickups are fairly close to the ground though, so swooping in to collect one, especially in the heat of battle, can be a risky move. Often, this would see us attempting to grab a pickup in a small ravine, only to hit the walls on the way out, making us deader than Dak. Oops.
Grab the Hero pickup, meanwhile, and a Rebel player can punch it with Chewie in the Millennium Falcon or go bounty hunting from the cockpit of Boba Fett's Slave-1 ship. These Hero starfighters are particularly useful when objectives come into play, like having to escort or destroy an Imperial shuttle or Rebel transport as it strives to make its way from one point to another.
Successfully protect or blast the vessel to smithereens (depending on which team you're fighting for), and you'll earn a hefty sum of points towards reaching that winning score of 200, so it's worth making a beeline for the objective when it pops up during a match.
Boasting support for 20 players, Fighter Squadron's dogfighting action is so fast and frenetic that 10 v 10 seems like the perfect number to be inhabiting the same airspace at once, with AI ships on either side providing a bit of cannon fodder for the less seasoned pilots, who can still make a difference to the overall score as a result.
It seems like a perfectly pitched balance that embraces players of all skill levels while ensuring the skies are constantly bristling with activity, which is nice. Star Destroyers loitering menacingly amid the clouds also helps in adding a sense of scale and atmosphere to proceedings too.
Adding Fighter Squadron to the list of previously revealed modes like the large-scale 40-player combat of Walker Assault, the Conquest-style 20 v 20 fight for control points in Supremacy, 10 v 10 team deathmatches in Blast mode, as well as the yet to be detailed Survival, Cargo and Drop Zone modes, Star Wars: Battlefront is set to be a package that'll be impossible to resist. Search your feelings, you know it to be true. This is the Star Wars game you're looking for.
Star Wars: Battlefront launches on 17th November 2015.