Category: Games

Warning: The Boys Season 2 spoilers below.

With Season 2, The Boys proved that it’s one of the best shows on TV–as well as one of the goriest. If you’ve ever wondered what it would really look like when Superman directed his “heat vision” someone’s way, or what would happen to a whale if a pointy speedboat hit it broadside, full tilt–not that that’s a normal thing to wonder about, but still–The Boys is the show for you.

That level of blood and guts doesn’t get cobbled together in an afternoon, particularly when heads are popping like bubble wrap in a crowded congressional hearing. To find out just how much work went into those effects and more, we jumped at the opportunity to chat with The Boys associate producer and VFX supervisor Stephan Fleet.

With light editing, our full chat is below. After you find out everything Fleet had to say about heads popping, faces melting, and just how desensitized he’s become to all the gore, check out our The Boys Season 2 ending explainer, everything you might have missed in the season finale, our interviews with Shawn Ashmore (Lamplighter), Claudia Doumit (Victoria Neuman), and Nathan Mitchell (Black Noir), and our in-depth video breakdowns of the full season.

GameSpot: The comics are so gory and insane, and I’ve read that you’ve basically had to tone it down from the comics. The show is pretty over the top. But I think the comics even more so.

Stephan Fleet: Yeah, I mean, I think from the very beginning, Eric Kripke, and Seth [Rogen] and Evan [Goldberg], at the very, very beginning when I was talking to them, Eric definitely came in with his own take on the comic book where he, I think, found a really clever way to balance honoring the sensibilities and the tone of the comic book, but also bringing in his own sensibilities and tone. And I think from the beginning, he said, like, “We’re not going to go as belligerently insane as the comic book,” just in the sense of the sheer gore and violence and stuff. We have ramped up the gore [in Season 2], I think–we have like a gore dial, you know what I mean? I think one thing that Eric’s very good at doing, and we work on in post a lot and in production, is like, how much or how little gore are we going to see, to sort of give the sensibilities of the comic book and give the comic book fans what they want, but then also pull it back into the world that we’ve created. So you get these pockets of sort of fun gore that we definitely work on a lot in visual effects. But yeah, you know, it’s become its own thing. It really has.

I mean, I would say the gore in this show is maybe toned down only in comparison with the comics. Compared to anything else, it’s pretty intense.

It’s funny man, you say that to me–I’m so desensitized to it because I have to work on this stuff frame by frame, that for me, it’s like, “OK, cool, could we put a little more brain in that head over there? Can we get an eyeball like, falling out of this thing?” For me, it’s just like a Wednesday. But I’ve noticed that when I look at a lot of the social media and stuff about the show, people are like, “Holy s*** it’s so gory.” And I’m like, oh, yeah, I guess it is.

Episode 6, in particular, had had lots of little nods to the comics, with all the supe patients at Sage Grove. Was it fun recreating some of the powers from the books, like the acid vomit guy and “Love Sausage”?

It was a lot of fun. I got to second unit direct a lot of the stuff with the people in their cells. They were so busy filming, we actually had three units going on at the same time. So I was the third unit doing that stuff. And it sort of fell upon me–if you read the script, it had a lot of suggestions for powers for the people in those cells. But Eric and the director, Sarah Boyd, who’s amazing, by the way, sort of turned to me and were like, “Since you’re gonna be the guy making these powers and you’re pretty close to it, you want to pitch us a bunch of powers?” And so I ended up doing a whole spreadsheet of different ideas for powers that I thought would fit our world.

We tend not to go too over the top with the superpowers in the show. We try and downplay it, but at the same time, we have to have them. It’s a really interesting line that we try and ride there. And there were a few that we ended up editing out. We had a person with a sort of toad tongue effect grabbing a fly, and it just felt a little too comical for our world, so we cut that one out. But it was fun to bring back our tiny hero from Season 1. That was one of my pitches–let’s bring back the little guy, put them in the corner, just as a little nod to Season 1.

And then beyond just this stuff on the screens, we had a lot. That was one of my hardest episodes to do actually, in visual effects, just because we had so many unique superpowers, but we have to treat each one like it’s as important as one of our hero superpowers. We don’t spend any less time researching and developing the one guy that blasts the van versus like, Homelander’s eyes. We spend the time–we make sure that everything’s quality and comes from some sort of motivated reasoning or perspective in our own internal logic.

Speaking of high quality, we have to talk about the head popping. The hearing at the end of Episode 7 was one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen on TV.

That was one of the most rewarding sequences for me. The whale [in Episode 3] was very rewarding–I don’t want to skip over the whale. But I will say that it was another situation where it heavily fell upon me to figure out the logistics of how we were going to shoot that day, working with Stephan Schwartz–another Stephan, the director–he did the Believe Festival episode in Season 1. He had a lot of trust in me and vice versa. So we had a good time shooting that sequence. And Dan Stoloff, our [director of photography], is really great. The three of us were tasked with like, how do we do 20-something head pops in this courtroom scene. And I think we had like two days to shoot it or something like that.

So it was a combination of really figuring out what our hero shots were, the first two guys [who explode], and finding techniques to film the rest of the scene. And then our [assistant director Jack Boem] was also really great, because he figured out a way to time all the background extras, like he would go one, and then the jerk to the left, and then two, and then jerk to the right. So it was kind of fun to just watch in real life how it all happened.

We had a company called Rocket Science VFX that we’ve worked with since Season 1. We have a lot of great companies that work on the show, but they’ve sort of become our “Homelander lasers people in half blood” people. And this season, they became our head popping group–and they did the shot where Homelander lasers the crowd in Episode 5. And it just worked out really well. [Rocket Science] nailed it. I got to sit in spots virtually with Eric at that point, because we had the [coronavirus] on us already. So we’re all virtually spotting this stuff. But you know, you’d hear him laughing, and you always know you’re onto something if you get a good laugh out of Eric in a visual effects spot.

What was the process of actually creating the effects for the head pops like?

It’s a lot of CG, but for the first two, which we call “hero,” that are the most important ones, that we’re going to hold on the most, which were the senator–the chairman–and Vogelbaum, we had prosthetic dummies built without heads, and we covered him in blood and like, bananas mixed with fake blood, that kind of stuff. So you kind of shoot it before and after. And then visual effects does the in-between and marries the two. And they were heavily planned out. I [pre-visualized] everything myself, so I have little cartoons of the shots, I knew where the green screens went–again, we didn’t have much time. So it was like, I show the picture or the video to the director and the DP, and they’d be like, “OK,” and obviously, the DP is going to find a better framing than me and I’m not holding on to that, but a ballpark idea of like, “OK, if the camera’s here, we put a green screen here, we put the guy here.”

So that’s how we did the first two, and those took a while, but then we kind of came up–you know, you do this a while, you learn that you’re going to end up shooting from the hip sooner or later. Nothing’s ever going to go perfectly. And so, as the day went and time started running out, I would just look for opportunities. A great example is the assistant lady. There’s this great shot, it’s one of the last head explosions, where you’re behind the lady tracking her and she’s running with Neuman, and her head explodes and she drops to her knees and falls. And that was literally just, we just had the actor shoot it, and I just kind of looked at the footage to ask for a replay, and made sure that her head was not overlapping into people, and that we had a nice piece of wall so that we could paint it out. So it’s just, with a technical eye, just looking at it saying, “This will work.”

And it did, you know? It was a little risky. It was just literally at a certain point, just shooting footage, and then we just overlaid visual effects on top of it. We had our special effects guys, I mean, a lot of it, frankly, shooting blood cannons on everybody. So we really got people covered in blood. But it’s kind of like rain. In movies, you don’t really see real rain, it doesn’t show up on cameras, you have to get really thick with it. So we ended up adding a lot of that digitally on top of the practical stuff, because it’s just hard to see. Cameras don’t pick it up. But yeah, we had kind of three stages: We shot the whole thing with the crowd, no blood, then some blood, and then a lot of blood on them so that we could cut intercut footage of people covered in blood. It takes a lot of thinking to pull off a scene like that.

The scene is also a triumph of editing. When you go back and watch it in retrospect, after seeing the finale, it’s super clear that Victoria is the one doing it. But it’s subtle enough that you wouldn’t notice it unless you already knew. There’s literally one Reddit topic from like four days ago, where someone’s like, “What if she’s the one doing it? Because it seems like she’s looking at all these people right before they explode.” And all the comments are like, no, that’s stupid.

I have to like bite my tongue every time. Or like that photo, you know, we have that press photo of her looking a little maniacal–she was actually just being silly…it’s gonna have a whole different meaning after [the finale airs].

In the lead-up to the finale, almost no one suspects that it’s her.

I know. It’s great. We did a good job. It’s interesting–the biggest thing we had to figure out was in Episode 8. It’s the glow effect in her eye. One of the things we did, when we originally did that shot, the eyes were glowing the whole time, and then they fade off, and it looked really cool, and it timed out really cool. But when we were looking at it, testing it, we were like, “Wait a second, it’s really going to not work with Episode 7.” Because then that means we’d have to have seen her eyes glowing at some point [during the hearing]. But if we just have them kind of come on and off, you can watch Episode 7, and you can buy that we’re cleverly cutting away at times when her eyes aren’t glowing.

So a lot of thought was put into it. And you know, again, not to give Eric too much credit, but he is the showrunner and an awesome dude and created this little show. He’s really, really involved in editing and visual effects. I really like his approach to how he makes a show in general, because we shoot a lot of coverage, and the way he manipulates the coverage in editorial is like a master’s class. Of course, we have fantastic editors, but it’s really a master’s class in watching someone dial up and down the tension or the logic or the story. I mean, he really gets into it. So it’s fun, I sit in on a lot of that, when it’s visual effects related, and it’s really great to watch how he does it. He was very intentional–he spent a lot of time on that scene in Episode 7, very intentionally putting it together.

To go back to the whale for a second, I thought it was insane that that was at the end of Episode 3, because that’s like a season hero shot and there’s no way they’re going to top that. I was wrong, of course, because we got to Episode 7. Was there anything that was that was too crazy for this season?

Nothing makes me feel crazy anymore on this show, I have to say. I’ve definitely redefined what crazy is…Arv Grewal, our production designer, spent a mammoth amount of time building the practical whale set, and we spent an equally mammoth amount of time with ILM [Industrial Light & Magic] creating the whole shark to whale sequence. It was a lot of fun. I mean, the fun thing about The Deep is, again, a lot of the time we downplay the comic book nature of the visual effects in the show, but with The Deep, because he’s our clown, he’s our jester–right? He’s our court jester in the show, he’s the slapstick component. We’re able to infuse some of that. So I get to go for it and do things that I’d probably refrain from doing with other characters–you know, the gills too, which, they’re mostly CG, like 90% CG–it’s such an absurd thing to do, and really complicated and hard at the same time.

So yeah, the whale sequence, you know, the difference between like the whale sequence and, say, Episode 6, is we had a tip off early on about the whale sequence, so we really braced for it. We braced for the storm, no pun intended–and there’s not a storm so it’s not even really a pun. But we planned for it. I mean, I think ILM executed it to perfection. It went about as smoothly as something like that can go–even filming [The Deep actor Chase Crawford] with that one shot on the blue screen I had to do went really well. It’s a lot of fun. It felt really good. It’s weird how something big like that ends up not being the most difficult thing, and then something left-hooks you that you didn’t think about being a complicated visual effect. Like for example, the acid guy’s face, that was an incredibly difficult shot to pull off, because you’re just holding on a guy’s face getting melted, and it ended up going all CG. It’s just very difficult. You want to get out of it without people going, “Ugh, that’s obviously CG,” you know? That’s the goal, right? But yeah, the whale was a great time, man. I got to be in a helicopter, be a kid, have an adventure.

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Just a year ago, Disney+ was a brand new beast in the streaming space, hitting the ground running with a fabulous first season of The Mandalorian. Now, streaming is becoming a focus for the company and prompting a major reorg in the process.

Disney is restructuring to focus on its direct-to-consumer strategies, and will centralize its various media businesses into a single organization responsible for content distribution, ad sales, and streaming.

“I would not characterize [the reorganization] as a response to Covid,” Disney CEO Bob Chapek said on CNBC’s Closing Bell program. “I would say Covid accelerated the rate at which we made this transition, but the transition was going to happen anyway.”

“We are tilting the scale pretty dramatically [towards streaming],” Chapek also said. He added that the company is looking at its investments, including suspending the yearly shareholder dividend (payout), to increase how much it spends on new content.

″[Consumers] are going to lead us,” Chapek said during the same interview. “Right now they are voting with their pocketbooks and they are voting very heavily towards Disney+. We want to make sure that we are going the way the consumers want us to go.”

Disney has over 100 million subscribers to its various streaming services, and 60-plus million of those are on the hook for Disney+, with others spread across Hulu and ESPN’s offerings.

Chapek also said that the shift could result in layoffs, but “not likely at the same scale” as the layoffs last month that saw 28,000 workers laid off in light of ongoing park shutdowns in California.

“Given the incredible success of Disney+ and our plans to accelerate our direct-to-consumer business, we are strategically positioning our Company to more effectively support our growth strategy and increase shareholder value,” Chapek said in an official statement. “Managing content creation distinct from distribution will allow us to be more effective and nimble in making the content consumers want most, delivered in the way they prefer to consume it.”

Disney shares jumped 5% following the announcement.

Disney+ continues to grow. On the television side, the Mandalorian’s hotly-anticipated second season premieres on October 30. WandaVision, the first of Marvel’s laundry list of announced TV offerings, drops in December. On the movie front, Disney sent Mulan directly to streaming earlier this year, while Pixar’s next bit movie, Soul, is heading directly to Disney+ in November. We can’t help but wonder if the much-delayed Black Widow is headed that way, too.

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If you have Xbox Game Pass for PC, then there’s a good chance there’s some crossover between your Steam library and what’s available at no additional charge through the subscription service. But now, a new browser extension has been created to help prevent this by showing you when a Steam game is available through Game Pass.

Ali Güler has created a browser extension, Game Pass Info For Steam, that adds a notification to game pages when you’re checking the Steam store through your browser. The extension, which is available for both Chrome and Firefox, adds a green bar if a game is available through Game Pass for PC, telling you when it was added to the service.

“Have you ever had the situation where you bought a game, only to later find out that it’s already on Xbox Game Pass,” Güler asks on the page. “It happened to me. Luckily it was only 10 bucks.”

The extension has been updated since launch to show games that have left Game Pass, and making it easier to report errors, too.

If you find yourself using and appreciating the extension, you can send Güler a donation through either PayPal or Buy Me A Coffee.

Xbox Game Pass is an essential part of Microsoft’s Xbox strategy going forward, with all first-party games appearing day one on the service. Xbox has also said that game streaming through Game Pass is planned for consoles and PC in the future.

In this video, Persia talks about an early unboxing video of the Xbox Series X that surfaced this morning. The video shows off the exterior and interior of the box, the console, the controller, and the accessories. Another image found on Reddit showcased a retail-looking room with stacks of Xbox Series X boxes ready to be shipped. The Series X and S launch on November 10th.

Persia also goes over the new details from Insomniac’s Instagram that tell us more about Spier-Man: Miles Morales. A Daily Bugle article talks about the city watching Miles train along the rooftops with Peter Parker. This tells us that Miles will have familiarity with his abilities before the game starts and Peter Parker could have a significant role in the game as Miles’ mentor. We also got our first look at Miles’ trademark hoodie costume, the same outfit he wore in Into the Spiderverse.

Lastly, Persia talks about a Dreamcast mini that could possibly be in the works. In a Famitsu interview translated by Siliconera, Sega creative producer Yosuke Okunari talked about the company’s mini consoles and said, “For the next Mini, we are considering everything that has been imagined by everyone. If I have to say some names, it could be an SG-1000 Mini or a Dreamcast Mini.” The original Dreamcast was home to Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, and many more.

This is your Save State for Monday, October 12th.

We’re on the brink of a new console generation, as Microsoft is ushering in the Xbox Series X and S consoles in November. In addition to a new form factor and more powerful processors, the consoles come with a new boot-up sound.

With that in mind, we’re looking back at the Xbox boot-up sounds from over the years, beginning with the original Xbox in 2001. Check out the video here to listen to boot-up sounds and animations for all of the Xbox consoles to date. It’s a fun stroll down memory lane, and something to enjoy as we wait for the launch of the new consoles.

The Xbox Series X/S systems release on November 10, so it won’t be much longer until everyone can get their hands on them. Keep checking back with GameSpot for lots more on the consoles in the days and weeks ahead!

Burger King has released a new teaser that suggests that it’s partnering with Sony for some kind of promotion, and people believe it may be connected to the PlayStation 5.

The advertisement shows the Burger King himself opening a takeout bag, with a blue light shining in his eyes. A short sound can also be heard. The ad ends with the mascot walking away to reveal the date October 15, which is presumably when all will be revealed. “Do Whopper sandwiches normally do this?” the message asks.

The ad does not mention PlayStation or PS5 at all, but the official PlayStation account quote-tweeted the video with the look and listen emojis. Given that tease, people are speculating that what we’re hearing is the PS5 start-up sound, but that’s only conjecture at this point.

This is not the first time we’ve heard the distinct tone featured in the Burger King ad. Back in June, the same sound played during Sony’s deep-dive video on the PS5. You can hear it for yourself in the video below.

For its part, Microsoft has teamed up with Taco Bell for an Xbox Series X promotion, so this is not the first time a gaming company has worked with a fast food chain.

For more on boot-up sounds and sequences, check out our rundown of the best boot-up sequences from various consoles throughout the years.

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For all the ups and downs I’ve had with various Star Wars media products over the past few decades, the formative space combat simulations of X-Wing and TIE Fighter on MS-DOS (or at least, my memory of them) have always been a fixed highlight. It’s hard to go astray when you’re focused on the minutiae of inherently cool sci-fi fantasy planes, as opposed to whatever’s going on with Jedi lineages or space politics now.

There have been a few arcade-style Star Wars space combat games that filled the 20-year period since the last flight simulator, and some of them were even good. But Star Wars: Squadrons is now making a welcome return to some of the simulator intricacies, while still retaining a large degree of the approachable spectacle of the arcade-style flight games. And the balance Squadrons has settled on works very well in creating an experience that makes you feel as if you’re really an active participant in a Star War.

The basic mechanics will be familiar if you’ve ever played any kind of flight game. You pitch your fighter up and down, you bank it left and right. You fly forward, not backward, and you can twirl until you feel sick. You maneuver your crosshairs onto an enemy and then fire lasers or missiles at them. You’re locked to a first-person cockpit view of the action, but all of Squadron’s missions are in space, which means maintaining altitude isn’t something you have to worry about, and instead, you get the wonderful freedom of being able to fly along any axis–rolling your ship and flying upside down is a hoot. It feels like you could feasibly finish the Squadrons campaign relying mostly on those principles if you wanted to, especially on lower difficulty levels, and that’s great. But Squadrons digs a little deeper with the ability to reroute power on your ship, a system that brings a nice layer of complexity in the advantages that it can open up for you and the considerations that come with that.

Each starfighter in Squadrons has the ability to rebalance the feed of power to prioritize different ship components: the engines, the laser weapons, and, on certain ships, the shield system. Doing so gives you access to specific benefits related to that system at the cost of reducing the efficiency of the others. Diverting all power to the engines makes your ship more maneuverable, gives you a faster top speed, and charges a speed boost; prioritizing lasers will let you overcharge them and fire them for longer; focusing shields will allow them to recharge faster, and overcharge them to absorb more damage than normal. Furthermore, ships with shields can also choose whether to divert shield coverage to the front of the ship, the back of the ship, or balance them all over. It’s not exactly on par with the Star Wars simulators from the ’90s (power diversion isn’t as granular, and you can’t adjust your firing patterns or anything like that), but the notable systems are there, and there’s still plenty to think about when you’re in the thick of things.

You can leave the systems equally balanced and still be fine, but it’s exciting to make these snap decisions in the middle of a mission and act more like the ace pilot you’re supposed to be. Sure, you could simply let your X-Wing cruise over the Star Destroyer and shoot at its targeting module until your lasers run out, eating a bit of damage in the process, and then repeat. But you could definitely get things done way more efficiently if you shift power to your shields as you approach in order to overcharge them, flip everything to lasers as you begin to fire to get a dozen more shots in before you overheat, and then push everything to the engines as you crank the throttle to get clear, quickly shifting all your shields to the rear to absorb all the turret fire coming your way. Constantly having your mind occupied with these mechanics on top of your mission objectives can give even the most straightforward sorties an involved and exciting edge to them, especially knowing that you could be putting yourself at greater risk if you’re in a bad configuration for the situation. The commands are simple to execute (mapped to the D-pad on a controller by default, though you can reconfigure all controls), meaning the challenge comes from internalizing the best options for the situations you find yourself in and remembering to change things up when the time comes, in the heat of the moment.

Of course, the feedback you get in playing with these systems does a lot to make the experience really satisfying, and the tried and true Star Wars production design is executed well in Squadrons. The familiar sounds of droids and proton torpedoes are weirdly comforting, and hearing the crunch of titanium as you fly past a TIE you just obliterated is very exciting. The unique cockpits of each ship have a great look too, with easy-to-read gauges that don’t betray the excellent retro-futuristic boxiness of the ships themselves. I personally appreciated the extra touch of ’70s chic with some fantastic hairstyles on some of the pilots, though a few of the “cooler” campaign characters obviously didn’t get the memo.

Across 14 missions lasting around eight hours in total, the campaign of Squadrons jumps back and forth between the journeys of two pilots, each flying on one of the two sides of the intergalactic war between the freshly rebranded New Republic and the Galactic Empire. It all starts with a defection, which leads to a secret military project and light musings on loyalty, personal morality, and what constitutes a victory while serving during wartime–a plot that succeeds in justifying the escalation of exciting space combat encounters, if nothing else.

The missions themselves are straightforward in nature, all offering a smattering of dogfighting as well as at least one other objective, such as taking down a larger enemy ship, defending one of your own, or hitting stationary targets like reactor cores and shield generators. There is some wiggle room for variance in approaches or strategies, but nothing major. Optional objectives crop up at times and can serve as ways to make an upcoming task easier if you’re good enough to complete them. Later missions allow you to alter your loadout, and some even let you choose the ship you take into battle, but for the most part, a lot of these variables are predetermined in such a way that gives you ample opportunity to get familiar with the game’s meaningful variety of vehicles and loadout options.

What makes these missions special are not the raw objectives, though: It’s the spectacle of some of the maps they take place on. Squadrons takes you to some exciting regions of the Star Wars galaxy, which are easy to appreciate right away. Colorful nebulas filled with lightning storms, Star Destroyer graveyards, and a shattered moon are just some of the memorable stages for the campaign encounters.

You don’t need to be a Star Wars fan to understand the game’s events. There are a couple of brief but notable cameos from the Star Wars canon, but more time is spent getting to know original characters, the members of Vanguard and Titan squadrons–the Republic and Imperial teams, respectively. They fill the missions with practical radio chatter, but you get a better opportunity to dive into their characters through optional conversations that you can access before and after missions.

Vanguard Squadron is made up of a ragtag group of humans and humanoid aliens with personalities as varying as their colour palette–the confident one! The timid one. The scoundrel. Titan Squadron, on the other hand, is an all-human squad. And while each character shares a hint of backstory that explores how any sane person in this universe could come to join the fascist Empire, all of that is betrayed by character designs that strongly suggest that these people are all absolutely, definitely evil–menacing scars, elitist personalities, an ex-cop who loves “delivering justice,” and one guy who cannot take off his terrifying, half-melted full-face pilot’s helmet. Needless to say, despite the welcome opportunities for character interaction, the limited amount of face-to-face time you get to actually spend with your squads means your look into their lore and personalities rarely goes too deep, and it’s hard to form any real connection with them.

Compounding this is the fact that your two protagonists are both silent. Despite character customization being the first thing you’re asked to do–part of which is choosing their voice and personality–your character is never seen and rarely heard from during the campaign. You can be an absolute hero who carries the squad when you’re in combat, but when you’re simply hanging out in the… hangar, you feel more like a fly on the wall than a member of the squad, which is awkward.

Conversations with your fellow squad members are more like lengthy monologues that you listen to politely, and toward the tail end of the campaign, you feel like a meaningless pawn being pushed around to fight a feud you have no feelings on. Your character is unable to express even a fraction of the hesitation or emotion seen in the supporting cast, which undersells big story beats and what little the game is trying to accomplish in its thematic explorations, especially with the Empire. But, by and large, the majority of the campaign is still filled with good scenarios that push you to pilot your funky space planes as best you can.

Of course, the other major component (if not the main component) of Squadrons is its 5v5 online multiplayer. There is a team deathmatch mode dubbed ‘dogfighting,’ as well as the Fleet Battles mode, an objective-based tug-of-war scenario between the two main Star Wars factions. In Fleet Battles, the Republic and Imperial teams each enter the battlefield with a battlecruiser and two frigates, with the goal being to push through the opposing team’s frigates and eventually destroy their battlecruiser. You do this by building attack momentum, destroying both player-driven and AI starfighters on the other side to gain points, which will then herald the arrival of an AI-driven corvette, that will automatically push into enemy territory and help you attack the capital ships head-on.

If you’ve ever played a MOBA, or one of the many multiplayer games that have taken inspiration from them, then you’ll have a good grasp of the Fleet Battle dynamic. It rewards well-rounded team compositions, especially when each pilot adheres to the strengths of their ships–whether it be fighter, bomber, interceptor, or support. Success typically comes from coordinating with your team to attack in tandem with your AI ships to make the most out of each push. At its best, these focused attacks on giant flagships with a tightly-knit squadron of players capture the feeling of Star Wars’ climactic starship battles.

Unfortunately, like MOBAs, your success in and the overall pacing of Fleet Battles can vary wildly thanks to the whims of online matchmaking. Unless you’re in a party of friends and have some kind of coordination with them, Fleet Battles can be a slog. In a party of random players, you’ll often find yourself in situations where no one on the team is making enough of a concerted effort to push when it is most opportune to do so or defend when the dynamics of a match shift against your squadron. At worst, it can be a drag, drawn out to the maximum time limit of 30 minutes, where the natural ebb and flow of AI ship spawns will bring the match so exceedingly close it might as well be a coin toss to decide the winner. Your efforts to rally your teammates by pinging ships to attack or defend can so often ring hollow, leaving you to make solo kamikaze runs into capital ships in an effort to try and nudge the needle in your favor, just a little bit. It can be frustrating–you’d think the general attitude among players would be towards teamwork and playing to objectives, especially given that Fleet Battles is the game’s only ranked multiplayer mode.

But even in the most uncoordinated Fleet Battles, Squadrons has the capacity to create some excellent moments, like hiding your ship among some debris amidst the chaos, secretly bombarding a capital ship at long range in your Y-Wing, and getting giddy at the idea that the other team is going to catch you out very soon. And then, of course, there are the dogfights, which are so easy to get sidetracked by on account of the sheer excitement of the chase. The flight options at your disposal as well as loadout varieties offer many ways to manipulate the duel one way or the other in the midst of the action, and the rush you get from close fights can be incredible. And that’s not to mention that the whole feat is an audiovisual extravaganza of screaming engines, shaky cockpits, and dizzying twists and turns.

The thrills of those duels happen a lot more in the dedicated team deathmatch mode, naturally, where the playfields are smaller and there isn’t any room for confusion as to the objectives of the match. But even though the mode is a team-based one, so many times I’ve hopped into random matches and found myself establishing a focused rivalry with just one pilot on the other team, getting into exclusive cat-and-mouse chases throughout the duration of the match. There’s definitely a prevalent part of the current multiplayer community who love a tense dogfight, and have an interest in sizing up against pilots of their skill level rather than trouncing on a rookie. When you find yourself in one of these duels, Squadrons feels like the definitive starfighting experience.

Much like the campaign, it’s the maps that play an integral part in heightening these fights. Though there are only six in total, they are all excellent playgrounds that make starfighter chases more exciting, with plenty of obstacles to zip through and around at high speeds. I’ve had my most memorable duels in the dense asteroid field of Galitan, where you can throw all your power into your engines, weave back and forth through a cluster of space rocks and then suddenly loop-the-loop around one and get right behind your pursuer. The same can be said of Esseles, where you can get rid of a tail by taking a risk and flying down into the tight corridors of the space station, keeping your enemy guessing as to which hallway you’ll go down next, and maybe dropping a seeker mine in a particularly squeezy doorway as a surprise. The only real dud map in my eyes is Yavin, which is purely empty space and has no obstacles whatsoever. Yavin matches are always just bloodbaths of laser barrages from all angles and at great distances, where your survival is entirely dependent on praying that no one will spot you as soon as you spawn next time.

Squadrons also features a progression system that rewards two different currencies to spend on unlocking different ship components and cosmetic items, and the game is notably free from microtransactions. Simply leveling up your profile will allow you to unlock a useful variety of different loadout options for either Republic or Imperial ships, each of which will give your ship a distinct edge in one facet of its operation at the cost of suffering in other areas. The currency for cosmetics is also doled out in daily challenges, and it’s a slow drip-feed. Fortunately, the quantity of truly interesting cosmetic options is also quite low, at least for my taste, meaning the time I needed to spend in order to afford the things I wanted felt reasonable.

The real reason that you’re driven to keep playing Squadrons is for the pure joy of dogfighting, whether that be in the game’s team deathmatch mode, campaign setpieces, or perhaps in VR on PS4 and PC, where the sensory deprivation and head-tracking give you an extra layer of physical response to your flight maneuvers, which can be exciting for as long as you can stomach it. The campaign’s narrative leaves you wanting, and the flagship Fleet Battles can be incredibly uneven. But the feeling of Squadrons’ core flight combat is gratifying enough to sustain you through it all. The involved nature of juggling all tasks required to operate your cool starfighter at peak efficiency while soaking in the more mechanical sights and sounds of Star Wars is a stimulating experience that Squadrons just gets right.