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!!!