Star Wars X-Wing: The Definitive Review
Being the movie inside the movie just like a movie would be if it was inside a movie
There was a bit in the opening mission of Star Wars: Squadrons that saw me put down the controller, never to return. I can’t even remember the specifics, but it was when the game crossed the line from giving you the sense of being in a simulation and into the realms of the amusement ride. The curtain had dropped, the mask had slipped. The hand was being held too tightly, and the way the mission began to unfold felt so aggressively managed and choreographed that I felt less a pilot and more a passive observer. Naturally, I skimmed a full playthrough and despite the missions opening up, they seemed remarkably dull and unengaging and small-minded. Beyond the lovingly-crafted presentation there seemed to be hardly anything else of substance. In short, I was glad I put the controller down.1 It’s when I start to think that watching a playthrough would be more fun than grinding through the tiresome exposition and heavily-baked challenges of some modern game that I know I’m wasting my time, as a well-developed spidey-sense for incoming frustration begins to tingle. Being incredibly old and bitter means this happens a lot, but in Squadrons’ case, it was connected to something far more ancient.
I took up Squadrons in 2023, not even realising it was thirty years on from one of its IP ancestors, which happens to be one of the greatest ideas ever committed to a videogame. Star Wars: X-Wing arrived in 1993 as an almost unexpected treasure, exploding out of the lineage of Lucasarts’ idiosyncratic flight sims of the 1980s. After 1991s Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, nobody expected Larry Holland to pivot to Star Wars, despite it being a completely free IP for Lucasarts to exploit. This is perhaps because Star Wars itself was at a cultural nadir, being caught in some purgatorial void of being too old to feel current but too new to warrant revaluation as commercially-viable nostalgia. Home machines had seen passable-to-excellent conversions of Atari’s early-80s vector-based Star Wars titles from 1987 onwards, ending with a fancy compilation on 16-bits in 1989. In 1990, Chris Roberts’ Wing Commander took enticing ideas of generic space opera and somewhat clunky dogfights to new heights, even if its bitmap-scaling graphical approach felt very much part of the status quo instead of the realtime polygon future we were all anticipating. Thus, X-Wing arrives as a kind of cultural shock, its quality of thinking and construction bringing a jolting realisation of how to do this shit correctly. And that’s what stands out today - the completeness, the correctness.
X-Wing wasn’t about recreating the movie, it was about extrapolating the universe to make a realistic simulation within it. And this is the critical difference between Star Wars Squadrons and Star Wars: X-Wing. X-Wing was about being a pilot. It wasn’t about being an exciting rollercoaster or ultimately unsuccessful multiplayer experience. Squadrons includes tokenistic technical details from the X-Wing series, but in an almost performative sense. Notably by copying the beautifully neat way X-Wing tasks you with managing your ship’s capabilities by balancing a pool of energy between engine, shield and weapon. In X-Wing, it promoted the sense of being a real pilot, of having real control over your ship and the tactics you, personally, need to deploy. In Squadrons the system is almost a qualifier of sorts, a way of linking itself to the glories of old as an attempt at validation. Given that the Rogue Squadron games had way more mainstream appeal than X-Wing ever had, it’s a bit baffling as to why Squadron tried to hook back into a semi-rigorous mindset rather than maximising the arcade angle that served Battlefront so well. I would contend that the successful route would be to follow X-Wing much more closely and deliver a properly modernised and, critically, expanded single-player game. If you really must do multiplayer, make it part of a specialised Battlefront spin-off, and just make it Ace Combat: Star Wars Edition. For one thing, the deliberately non-canon aspects of Battlefront makes it a perfect home for the weird upgrade and options aspect of Squadrons. I don’t recall Luke being offered anything other than a new R2 unit in A New Hope. He certainly wasn’t looking quizzically at a list of hull options he’d unlocked.
There was a very early X-Wing mission that sat you in an A-Wing and had you flying around a scrapyard of sorts to ID various spacecraft. I remember being particularly delighted that you got to fly the ship that, in a kamikaze manner, took down Vader’s own flagship, the Executor. I recall marvelling at its speed and nimbleness. The X-Wing was no slouch, but the A-Wing felt bonkers fast, and I took much joy in replaying that mission for its daring stunt routes, where you could thread all sorts of environmental needles in the tiny arrowhead fighter. And this was before you consider shepherding Y-Wings, protecting shuttles or taking on Tie Advanced fighters in bitter, drawn-out dogfights. In all of these, you felt you’d personally triumphed over the odds through your piloting skill alone, as the missions had plausible structures having been born from a team that had developed its experience in historical flight sims. All these explorations of what space-based fighter combat could be felt true to the movies, yet had a tactical realism that made sense. What’s particularly interesting is the lack of bombast; X-Wing was workaday piloting, a kind of bread-and-butter dogfighting life with a heavy lean on protecting things from the Empire or pirates. There was no ego-centrist “only pilot that can save the day” mandates or desperation to attain the dreaded label cinematic. It was instead mechanically coherent, building the sense of an actual military career instead of a narrative storyline of high spots and set piece splendour. X-Wing has a whole chapter dedicated to taking down a Star Destroyer, with preparatory missions and an eventual climax where I remember finally seeing the Invincible explode. It felt so very much earned after a brilliantly coordinated mission, involving taking out the shield generators to allow a Y-Wing bombardment with torpedoes, that felt utterly convincing as to how mere fighters could take down such a massive capital ship. X-Wing saw you often achieving tactical goals and then retreating when Empire reinforcements arrived, which again felt entirely authentic in a way that Squadron just didn’t. Perhaps it’s EA’s use of the Star Destroyer as a kind of Worf-like totem. Its appearance in Squadrons as something that’s relatively straightforward to capture seems nearly as fucking stupid as the literally single-handed takedown of one in Force Unleashed. X-Wing instead makes the Star Destroyer a colossal combination of Jaws and Moby Dick, a symbol of the Empire that is just as fearsome and dangerous as it was crossing the screen in the opening scene of A New Hope.2 Before the chapter dedicated to killing a Star Destroyer, you are told to run if one should arrive. Thus when you eventually play your part in destroying one, it feels like a win against massive odds rather than some cool content for cool points because it would be cool to have cool points for doing something cool with cool content.
The monomyth will contend that in the X-Wing series, it’s Star Wars: TIE Fighter that’s the best. But that’s wrong, because you’re Imperial-loving scum if you honestly believe that. Even though I did absolutely love TIE Fighter, it steps over a few lines that X-Wing was happy to stay within. Notably canonising Thrawn as a new and tiresomely hyper-intelligent super-villain, but also in introducing the TIE Defender, a kind of Mary Sue ship for perverts that like fascistic empires more than idealistic rebellions. While it may carry the (slightly) better graphics engine and remains the choice for retrospective modders, TIE Fighter will always be a continuation of X-Wing, because the original is so brilliantly complete. As mentioned earlier, 1993 was probably the time when Star Wars was at its lowest ebb culturally, and X-Wing perhaps serves as the fulcrum around which the IP enters a second, ascendant phase. Extended Universe fanfic novels and comics were present for the rabid, but there was something delightfully encyclopaedic about X-Wing’s sober presentation and bonus content, which confers a status upon the game as a lore repository and as both a realisation and continuation of particular childhood dreams. It never tried to outdo the movies, because all it wanted to do was build the universe where the movies happened and make it a flight sim. It never had ill-advised ambitions to reach beyond the foundational content, so it never risked overreach or spoiling the magical broth. What it had was a dutiful sense of reverence, a desire to document as well as exploit its IP. Within X-Wing, the Tech Room lets you view schematics and models for the game’s suite of iconic Star Wars craft3, which seems wonderfully generous in hindsight, as does the wonderful use of Lucasarts’ iMuse system for generating dynamic soundtracks. Adlib FM may be an acquired sonic taste but to hear the movies’ soundtrack blaring out with contextual relevance, as determined by your actions and successes and failures, was almost as dazzling as the polygon space battles. And in those battles, the twinkling pixels of distant friends and foes could be traced by the polygons of their exchanging shots, which in their flat-shaded form seemed so much more tangible than the wireframe representations of the Atari arcade titles. X-Wing was edging so much closer to representing the movies than we would have thought possible in the 1980s.
It’s wild to look at the PC releases in 1993 and realise that X-Wing and Rebel Assault came out in the same year. They are two sides of the Star Wars videogame coin; for everything great, imaginative, valuable in X-Wing, there’s something shit, boring and worthless in Rebel Assault. Being a CD-ROM shooting gallery, Rebel Assault wasn’t fit to lick X-Wing’s boots and yet as one of the big crossover heralds of the PC CD-ROM revolution, it likely made far more money. Luckily it maintained much the same sobriety with Star Wars lore as X-Wing, which left the door open for Dark Forces to wade in with a stupendously dull take on the must-stop-the-supersoldiers trope. Not that this mattered much - Dark Forces earned its plaudits by doing much the same as X-Wing in building the movies’ universe and letting a game happen within it, only its plot aimed to divert the big story of the movies in an annoyingly shit way, and I’d argue sets the scene for Star Wars games to engage in their own petty iconoclasms thereafter. This leaves X-Wing as a shining example of exploiting an IP to make a pretty grown-up game without ruining anything. It leaves me longing for licence holders to pay close attention to how X-Wing made a success of Star Wars without undermining its legacy or asking us to believe in utter bullshit because it’s ‘bigger and better’. One wonders how other Sci-Fi IPs could fare if given the same properly considered and thought-through gamification. Could we get a magnificent space-shooter out of Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica? Is it time for an equally respectful open-universe RPG set in the Original Series Star Trek universe? Will we ever get to be our own timelords with our own TARDIS? It’s a shame that the answer is probably “no fucking way”, but the beauty of IP translations like X-Wing is that they give you a framework from which dreams can be built and at the very least, we can give ourselves our own new hopes. Given the state of the industry today, perhaps that’s the best we can hope for.
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I did, in fact, end up picking up the headset to have a stab at it in VR and after having some brief flashes of childhood fantasy fulfilment in looking around a cockpit or two, was left equally as full of ennui as I had first time round. Oddly, my eldest - who was Star Wars obsessed at the time - had much the same experience. Beyond the surface, Squadrons falls so incredibly short of living up to the potential X-Wing set out.
This reminded me of why The Mandalorian Season 1 was so great - with it being grounded at the personal level, a single TIE fighter or Scout Walker was a monstrous, terrifying presence. As they fucking would be, right? So a Star Destroyer should feel absolutely unassailable as they did in X-Wing, not something you have to idly scan for breach points for some ludicrously easy boarding assault or, worse still, as a plaything for the worst and most ruinous excesses of Lucas’s magical space-knights mythology.
Consider that in 1993, you could only perv at the ships in the movies themselves or in stills printed in magazines and books. You were lucky if you had a decent model kit version, or had to put up with the dimensionally-deformed toy versions. Therefore to have a repository where you could view them from any angle and inspect their forms at your leisure was thing of rare beauty.