Backlog Beatdown: Warring in the Stars with Star Wars: Starfighter

Recently, my daughter became interested in Star Wars to the point of watching all nine films in less than a week, and while I’ll happily concede that some of the films are better than others, I usually manage to find something to enjoy about them. Watching bits of Episode 1 back certainly piqued my interest enough to try out Star Wars: Starfighter, a game I’d picked up as part of a Humble Bundle purchase but hadn’t yet played…

Canyon runs need precision...

For a game that was released to fill a large space in the market for video games based on Star Wars while the prequel trilogy was in full swing, Starfighter seems to have its mindset firmly rooted in combining the game – a light fighter simulator – with what Star Wars is at its core: A character-driven story. You play as a Naboo Starfighter pilot called Rhys, a mercenary pilot called Vana and a pirate called Nym at various stages of the campaign, which tells a story of a run-up to the events of the Invasion of Naboo from the Trade Federation. Together with a non-playable mechanic called Reti, they are attacked, betrayed and otherwise set against the Trade Federation, and launch a guerrilla campaign against them in their fighters and bombers.

The inevitable comparisons to X-Wing and TIE Fighter come to mind but I found Starfighter to be a welcome break from that kind of simulation-style gameplay. Your guns either never run out of ammo or recharge, your shields recharge over time but there’s no faffing about re-distributing power, and your speed is managed through a simple speed up / slow down command. All the fighters handle the same but are played slightly differently depending on their armament; Rhys flies a standard N-1 Starfighter which is good for dogfighting, Vana pilots a Guardian Mantis that is good for disabling shields, and Nym pilots his Havoc which is primarily used for bombing runs. There are thirteen missions in the campaign, each one its own set of rules and objectives that must be completed to proceed, with additional objectives available to achieve if you wish.

The last mission takes place during the 
Battle for Naboo...

Starfighter is a good game, but you must be in the right frame of mind for it. The levels are varied and well-designed, and you’ll get past the first of them without trying, after which you’ll face a large difficulty spike where the objectives and threats leave more room for failure. And I can guarantee you’ll find fifty different things to hate about the game when you fail a mission over and over again – but when you finally work out what to do and manage a perfect run, you’ll feel a grin of excitement spread across your face as the Mission Complete screen comes up. Rarely have more modern games made me feel so good about beating a level! The last missions are absolute beauties, requiring knowledge of what’s coming and when, and managing your speed.

A quick note on graphics and sound: Apart from the Star Wars soundtrack which is always excellent, this game was released in 2001 and its assets are showing their age. The fighters and droid vehicles are functional enough, but even for the time, those character models were hideous, and the voice acting sounds cheesy even for a Star Wars game. It didn’t affect my enjoyment, just don’t expect it to be easy on the eye!

Nym's bombs take some getting used to,
but are a lot of fun!

Star Wars games often run into the problem of the stakes being relatively low. Either they’re following the mainline plot of the films, in which case you’re re-telling a story already told, or they’re spun off from the films, in which case you don’t feel like you’re affecting the plot to any great extent because you know how it all works out. Starfighter is in the latter category. I don’t want to spoil the plot in the review so I won’t say if I was right – but I will say I wasn’t giving the game enough credit. I’ve described what I mean in the main blog so have a look at that if you’re interested.

I’d caution against spending any substantial amount of money on Starfighter, but if you can find it cheaply enough, it’s well worth your time.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Last Week's Games: Star Wars: Starfighter

Owing to my daughter’s newfound interest in Star Wars, I found myself playing a game I’d had for a while but never gotten around to playing: Star Wars Starfighter. I beat it as well, and the review for it is coming out on Friday. I’ve said most of what I want to say about the game there, but here I’d like to develop a point I made about the plot of Starfighter. Spoilers ahead, for whatever it’s worth!

Holding back the invading droids
was a huge amount of fun.

One problem that most Star Wars games run into is that they can’t really tell their own story without reducing the stakes. Most of the so-called Extended Universe has been declared Non-Canon now, presumably because Disney didn’t want to have to ret-con anything while they were making the new films, so that doesn’t help, but they still struggle either way. Of the games that are available, either they follow the mainline plot of the films, in which case they’re re-telling a story already told, or they’re spun off from the mainline plot, in which case you never really get the sense that you’re affecting anything major since the key points of the Star Wars saga happened in a story you’re not involved in.

Starfighter was always going to run into this issue, but it never loses sight of what Star Wars is at its core – a character-driven story adventure. It handles it quite well: The plot is set during the run-up to the Battle of Naboo in The Phantom Menace. Through their own activities as fighters, mercenaries and pirates, the four pilots discover a droid production facility on one of the planets and must work together in order to blow up the facility. The threat is established by showing the duplicitous nature of the Trade Federation to two of the characters in the early game, and resolved by having them participate in at least some of the battle of Naboo in the later game – you really do get a sense of how worse it could have been for Naboo had the Droid army been at full strength, which if your characters hadn’t been involved, it would have been.

Flying around a hangar is
always a bit fiddly...

Where Starfighter lets us down plot-wise is in the final boss. The fight itself is fine and takes a lot of the skills you’ve been building throughout the game, if a little annoying when you don’t know exactly where it’s going. But the problem with any battle fought in the Separatist portion of the saga is that as your opponents are always droids, they lack the necessary levels of humanity influence the plot themselves. Starfighter tries to get around this by having the Trade Federation employ mercenaries to interfere with negotiations at the start of the game when you’re escorting Queen Amidala, Rhys’ mentor is killed by one of them and he turns up at the end as the final boss having not participated in the story at any point in between. First, it doesn’t make sense for the Trade Federation to have attacked Queen Amidala before she signed their treaty, and second, it very much felt like a final boss for the sake of having a final boss.

None of which spoils the experience of the game, you understand. It’s still a fun space shooter that I was happy to play, and it made a refreshing change for me to play a game I can wrap up in a few days rather than several months! But it did make me think about the reasons that the plot of most Star Wars video games is often its weakest point and realise that we can be thankful for those games that counter it with some very solid gameplay.

As an aside, the exception here – and probably why this game is so fondly remembered – is Knights of the Old Republic. This was set far enough away from the plot of the Skywalker saga that the galaxy would have had time to sort itself out whichever way it went, but also Bioware had a very talented writing team at the top of their game telling a fun story with twists, stakes and bitter struggles that many still hold as the standard of RPG storytelling to this day.