-Quick Review-
Lets kick this review off with getting my quick opinions and biases out of the way: I've been a star wars fan since I was a kid, a fan long before Disney acquired the intellectual property, I'm not very fond of EA games as a publisher, and I love flight simulators - that counts double for Space Flight Simulators, specifically: X Wing Alliance and TIE Fighter.

I have a lot to say about this game, simply speaking "I like it", but make sure you pick it up on sale just in case you can't get the game to ACTUALLY load for you... I added it to my library when it was 90% off over the Steam Christmas Sale so that was worth the risk, but it does go on sale often other times. Be warned there's lots of people who have had problems getting it to run.

Star Wars Squadrons is a Space Flight simulator which can be played with an Xbox controller, flight stick, steamdeck, and can be played in VR. Squadrons was published by MOTIVE and released in 2020. Squadrons is broken up into two areas: The Single Player Story and the Multiplayer Experience.

Review Video:
If you don't like reading, or are curious about watching gameplay check out my video here:
https://youtu.be/dVD-4JccysU

-Detailed breakdown review-
Story: Welcome pilot. As far as the story is concerned you're already experienced and have recently been transferred to the New Republic's Vanguard Squadron or The Galactic Empire's Titan Squadron.

The story for Squadrons is told from the perspective of both Vanguard and Titan. You will switch between both factions as you play, at the start of the game you'll actually customize and name both pilots for the New Republic and Empire. There are 14 Missions and 2 Prologues in Squadrons the story will take roughly between 9 to 11 hours to complete. There are four difficulty modes, Pilot felt about right for me, Story Mode should make the game playable for nearly everyone regardless of flight simulator experience.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3136215191

You'll get a chance to know each member of your squadron a little before each mission. I would encourage getting every extra bit out of this game. I found the diversity of characters with the New Republic refreshing and much easier to identify, and laughed over how the Imperials were much less memorable because they were all humans with greasy slicked back hair.

As you fly through the 14 missions in Squadrons you'll learn of a secret weapon the New Republic is building called "Project Starhawk", but there's a level of intrigue due to the fact the man leading the project is imperial traitor "Lindon Javes", who Commodore Sloane tasks Terisa Kerrill with tracking down her former commander and ending project Starhawk.


https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3136282357

Gameplay: Let's start with the basics. You boot up the game, you click Story, or training (please don't click Quick Match yet)... Now what happens?

The WAY you fly will depend on your controller, but basically you'll point your ship in a direction and throttle up to speed up, or throttle down to stop. (Note the detail on how the cockpit shows where your throttle is as, and notice where the line is for where to cut your throttle to turn faster)
There are other indicators in your cockpit, three or two colored lines. Blue is your engine power, Red is your laser power, and green is your shield power (if you have shields).

There are also indicators for your left, and right auxiliary equipment, and countermeasures. These systems along with your Hull, Shields and Engine, can be customized to your liking for perks and drawbacks.
On the left of your dashboard there's a radar-map-type-thing which I mostly ignored but that's because I don't play games optimally.
On the right you have your shields and hull percentage. After shields go boom, your hull go down, hull go down to zero, you explode. Lastly there is also a Targeting screen in the bottom middle of your dashboard, it's the biggest screen there with a picture of the thing you're targeting.

Multiplayer: First things first, make sure you check your settings and turn off voice chat, or switch to push to talk mode before you play multiplayer, because it's left on by default.

So there are really only two game modes in Multiplayer: Dog Fight and Fleet Battles. Dog Fight is where you pit a squad of 5 players against 5 other players. I can't seem to ever get into them because no one is playing when I do... but I've been told by my brother he got into them over Christmas. Fleet Battles are where a squad of 5 players go up against a human or AI squad of 5 "players", and try to destroy the enemy capital ship the fastest.

As was discussed earlier about customizing ship loadouts... In Multiplayer you can go even farther by being able to customize your starship's paint job, add decals, add holograms, dashboard hanging flair and decorations! But woah hold on there cowboy, before you go spending any of your currency you should know there are two currencies in this game... One for ship upgrades, and another for cosmetics.

You can get these by leveling up or participating in daily challenges... but sadly I can't do any daily challenges because I can't seem to que for anything multiplayer. As it is right now. The only way I've unlocked anything is because I can play Fleet Battles vs AI on my own and get experience to level up my pilot.

VR: Normally I can't comment on VR because I don't have a VR headset (yet), however one of my brothers has a headset and streamed the gameplay to me. If you can get this game working in VR mode, you might never need to go to a theme park again! It looked good from my *over the shoulder screen shared perspective.*
It made me very jealous to hear him exclaiming "WOAHHH!" "This is so fun!" "Weeeee" "AHHHH! *Crash*"

I see some people are saying "Don't buy this game for VR because VR controllers don't work" or other reasons... That might be fair, I can't entirely speak for it because I don't have a VR headset... but it LOOKED fun to look around the cockpit. (Unless it's a TIE, there's nothing to see in there) But typically the problem people seem to have in VR is not being able to see as much as conventional gameplay from a monitor.

The detail that this game was made for VR also explains some design choices which I didn't really care for... You have some "viewing angles" for your starships when you're in the hanger, or in the briefing room. You don't move around 3d space, which I really REALLY wanted to be able to do. But since movement in VR tends to make people sick, it makes sense why it wasn't allowed.

Conclusion: In conclusion we swing back to the start of this review: I like Star Wars Squadrons. Perfect game? Nope. Can I play online? Not really... Will it work for you if you buy it? It very well might not! That's why I suggest picking it up on sale.

There's also a chance this game isn't really something you'd be interested in playing. That's fair too. I hope that my review either pushed you in one way or another and was reasonable. (If not maybe a little long winded) Thanks for reading!

-Quick Review-
STAR WARS: Bounty Hunter is a Third-Person Shooter where you’ll need to weigh the pros and con’s of going into slow motion mid fight to scan your enemies to see if there's a bounty on them. Or just go through level’s guns a blazin’!

STAR WARS: Bounty Hunter was developed by LucasArts and released on Nintendo GameCube and PlayStation 2 in 2002, it was ported by Aspyr and released on steam in 2024.

Review Video:
If you don't like reading, or are curious about watching gameplay check out my video here:
https://youtu.be/by0_8wTfj7M

-Detailed breakdown review-
Story: For those that don’t connect the dots, Jango Fett is from Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones. So that means Bounty Hunter takes place between Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones.

The Plot is that yet again something threatens the galaxy, only this time Darth Sidious calls up Dooku and says “Hey bro, what’s with this Cult called the ‘Bando Gora’ didn’t you have a chance to kill their ex-Jedi leader? Also Find a host for the clone army”. And Dooku says “Hey no worries, I’m good enough to kill two birds with one stone…”

The rest of the game is played as Jango Fett, tracking down the bounty on the leader of the Bando Gora Cult. You will cross paths with Zam Wesell, and obtain the Iconic Firespray-class Patrol Craft we know and love.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3337085753

Gameplay: STAR WARS: Bounty Hunter is a 3rd person shooter. You can play with keyboard and mouse controls, I would suggest playing with a controller. But even with a controller's thumbsticks, looking up and down is awful… There is a Camera Sensitivity slider… but unfortunately you can only change all sensitivity, instead of JUST vertical sensitivity. But I've dealt with this problem before while playing other video games… That being said the problem is about the same with keyboard and mouse controls… but I’ve seen some people are fine with Keyboard and mouse. You just kinda get used to whatever you need to deal with. (If that’s a deal breaker, that’s a deal breaker for you. That’s fine!)

I wasn’t that impressed with the platforming in Bounty Hunter either. Jumping around without the jet pack is painful. Thankfully there’s only a few levels where you don’t have a Jetpack and there isn’t that much precise platforming. But when they made me platform I tended to fall to my death early and then decided to just continue jumping down into the Abyss because I saw something shiny…

There are primarily two ways I played through levels in Bounty Hunter, at the start of the game I focused on being more meticulous in first scanning for bounties and then capturing the bounty before they decided to run into the line of fire and take a big ‘ol dirt nap. After the first few chapters I found myself dying a lot, and to offset my setbacks, I decided to pretend the scanner didn’t work, and gunned down everyone and their pet womp rat to finish the level.

Both will get you to the end of the game and it is generally easier to ignore bounties, but I feel like the “True” Bounty Hunter experience is to sneak around, tag your bounties, engage combat, and check new people for bounties mid fight. When you pull up your scanner the game goes into slow motion where you can still move around and tag new found bounties, but you’ve also become vulnerable because you put away your weapons to analyze incoming targets.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3337224048

Conclusion: I feel like I haven’t had a very long review for a game which took roughly 16 hours to finish the main story (I’ve disregarded what the game itself told me… it told me I beat the game in 9 hours 31 minutes, but that’s a lie because it didn’t count levels I restarted!).

It’s a Star Wars Game, it was a bit rough around the edges on console, it’s a bit rough around the edges with occasional glitches, sometimes I’d start a boss fight in slow motion because I was using the scanner… Other times bosses would get stuck on level geometry. At one point some guys showed up giving off severely-threatening T-Pose Energy.

But all in all, I’m content with my experience playing STAR WARS: Bounty Hunter. I think Star Wars Fans will prefer this game, it’s not some really super amazing game which pushes the boundaries of 3rd person shooter games. If you like Star Wars and/or the characters you’ll stick around for the story. If you’re feeling the itch to play an older gamecube/PS2 game you could pick far worse games to play then this one.