I've played enough of Fleet Battles to feel confident that it's a mode people will keep playing and develop more tricks for, with Discord groups planning out their exact ship selections and arsenals to complement each other like MOBA players before a match.

With a team of random players there's only so much coordination you can do, but Squadrons lets you swap ships mid-match to suit the moment, and there's also a ping system for calling out targets. Ship customization plays into this well: Ion cannons can take down shields quicker than lasers, while certain high damage missiles are ideal against capital ships but can only be fired from long range. Imperial teams really need a support ship, which can provide them temporary shields, to stick it out in longer battles against the New Republic.

You can pilot a heavy bomber and focus on dealing big damage to those capital ships, but you'll need teammates in nimbler craft, like the A-Wing or TIE Interceptor, to take down enemy fighters. They also force you to make decisions more complex than picking the fastest ship for a dogfight. Fleet Battles are great play spaces because they demand some strategy, but still allow for plenty of flexibility-they provide structure to dogfights that give moment-to-moment victories more meaning. If you destroy enough of the enemy team's fighters, you can push forward on the offensive, defeating two medium-size cruisers before tackling the Imperial Star Destroyer or Republic MC75. Squadrons keeps multiplayer lean with only two modes: dogfights (aka deathmatch) and Fleet Battles, which are tug-of-war contests between two enemy capital ships. Over the course of the campaign I started to get a feel for exactly when to cut the throttle to make a tight turn, when to flick all my power to weapons to lay on the damage, and how to survive by focusing my shields to the rear to take a few more hits from an enemy on my tail. The central system for both factions' four ships is power management, just like in the classic X-Wing games. It's a flight model far simpler than an Elite Dangerous or Microsoft Flight Simulator, but there's enough nuance to let skilled pilots excel. The flying in Star Wars: Squadrons is exactly what I hoped for. The campaign, which took me about 10 hours to complete on the default difficulty, never really surprises, but it does manage to accomplish something noteworthy: This feels like being in Star Wars in a way no game has in a long, long time. It's a thrill to pilot these ships a hair's breadth above the surface of a Star Destroyer, and through stunning nebulae and war wreckage more vivid than I could've possibly imagined while playing TIE Fighter in the late 1990s. Star Wars: Squadrons succeeds where it's most important.

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