And while it's a little more stripped-down than I would have liked,
Star Wars: Starfighter is an enjoyable gaming experience that'll have you trying to get all of the medals to unlock all the goodies. Though the single-player mission is a little on the short side, you'll be trying to master each level completely for a while.
SWSF tells the tale of three different pilots -- Rhys Dallows is a rookie from Naboo, Vana Sage is a mercenary with a heart, and Nym is a pirate who gets embroiled in it all. Each character flies their own ship, and each ship has its own main and secondary weapons. You don't choose a pilot for a given level, but you'll fly all three of them enough throughout the main game. The storyline itself is congruent with the first movie, but fortunately is nowhere near as annoying in its execution, and in fact ends up being quite interesting in its own right.
The core game mechanics are the same ones that we've been playing with since X-Wing, or more appropriately the Colony Wars games. There are attack missions and defend missions, for the most part, and you'll spend time in the cockpit hunting down enemy ships both large and small to end the threats. Space sims are pretty established nowadays, and SWSF doesn't do much to challenge that establishment.
One of the nicer features of Starfighter is the addition of a sniper mode, which zooms in on your targeting reticle. This is essential for long-range attacks, as unlike most games of this type, your shots go pretty much as far as you'd like them to. You can take out half of a wing in long-range mode, and often have to if you don't want to be blown to bits.
Yet, with that plus, comes a downside. In the stripping down of the typically complex space sim hud, Lucasarts got rid of the radar. While at first that seems only a minor inconvenience, when you get to some of the sprawling levels where you're asked to take out certain types of ships, and you have to pump the damn 'cycle targets' button like a madman, you'll wish for a radar. And when you have to defend a location or ship, it would be really nice to see them on a radar. While I understand that it may have been confusing to first-time space sim gamers, it would have been nice to have the radar and been able to turn it off.
There's a lot of stuff to unlock, but the game itself only lasts for a little over a dozen missions, which means that a good player could get through them all in a day. Unlocking is the key to longevity, which isn't terrible, but I wish there were more missions to go on in the main storyline.
