The game met my expectations. That is not a good thing by itself though. It is a very shallow, simplified Star Wars experience, unfortunately. I knew that when I bought it, because it is the first real Star Wars space game in 2 decades, so I wanted to experience it, and show that there is an interest in similar (hopefully more polished) ones in the future.
I liked the campaign - for the future I'd like to be able to have branching missions, where one missions outcome influences the future ones, a longer campaign and the chance to talk/answer your squadmates in conversations, with the answers influencing the campaign. Make it coop, for the ultimate bonus points (even if it is just replay missions in multiplayer). Hera was a highlight, my kids loved seeing her. No surprises in the story, but nicely told, all in all.
I liked VR - it is not fully there yet, and the skybox bug is really annoying, but games like this were made for VR. It is just such a gamechanger. Remove the motion blur, add a proper skybox, allow better targeting in VR (give me a 'target I am looking at' option) and it is great. No need for motion controllers, they don't make sense in a space game.
I also liked that you could turn off all external helpers, making you rely on your instruments you have in your cockpit. I don't want to follow an arrow, I want to fly my ship myself, thank you very much, much appreciated!
I didn't like the controls - they felt like they were made for a controller, the default HOTAS configuration was, suboptimal, and even after spending hours trying to finetune the (few) settings it never feels like you are in control of the ship, more like you try to steer it through jelly. Not really necessary, since all weapons autoaim like crazy, and on top of that you can get a proper autoaim weapon, so you only need to roughly point in the direction of the other ships to score hits.
The ships ... Well, a TIE-Fighter that tanks multiple shots of a corvette on Ace difficulty, just to repair it with a button push for another round? A-Wings dealing more damage than X-Wings? TIE Bombers shooting laser beams? Y-Wings without their Ion cannon? Part of this is a problem of the auto aim, if you will get hit and can't evade shots, your TIE has to be a tank. Every ship has to be. That the TIE-Fighter flies more like a Y-Wing from prior games does not help, gimicky boost or not.
I get it that they need to balance it for Multiplayer, but old games like X-Wing vs. TIE-Fighter did it way better, not all ships are supposed to be equal. Asynchonous balancing is harder, sure, but if you can field e.g. 2 TIE Fighters for every X-Wing, with an NPC taking over the TIE, and you switching into it on death if it is still alive, things change. In the past, the Z-95 Headhunter was the equivalent of the TIE-Fighter, the TIE-Interceptor for the X-Wing, both exchanging shields for speed and maneuverability. You could also make them cost less points, and the points you save on this life may allow you to field a stronger craft in the next wave (e.g. B-Wing or TIE-Advanced), which you normally couldn't. Many possibilities, but they chose the easiest, and, IMO, worst one.
The AI is also really, really bad. If a player stops in space I blame latency, but what is the reason for AI to just stand there and turn in place? They are also not really a threat unless in great numbers - the campaing is heavily scripted, so they mostly ignore you anyhow when you are supposed to attack the cap ship, but even in practice or solo fleet battles they are just targeting dummies, only a threat in high numbers.
On the other hand, my kids (6&11) can both handle them on the lower difficulties, with arrows telling them where to roughly aim at, auto aim doing the rest and the ships tanky enough to survive a death star laser point blank (Note - for story mode that is fine - they have an interactive film to enjoy). Seems they are the target audience, not me.
Still, I got what I expected, a few hours of fun for a few bucks. Luckily I got another game to fill my space needs, maybe the next Star Wars one can keep me, like X-Wing vs. TIE-Fighter or X-Wing Alliance, (or the original TIE-Fighter), where I spend hundreds, if not thousands of hours (hard to tell, nothing recorded your playtime back then)
EDIT: Multiplayer didn't work yet for me, always searching, then dropping me back to the Main Menu after a minute
