STAR WARS: Squadrons

A complete game, on purpose

STAR WARS: Squadrons made an unusual promise before it even launched. Speaking to press ahead of the 1 October 2020 release, creative director Ian Frazier was explicit that Motive Studio wasn't building a live-service game: "we're not trying to treat the game as a live service... you've paid the $40, this is the game and it's entirely self-contained." No season pass, no cosmetic shop, no battle pass, no promised roadmap of paid content — a single, fixed-price purchase for a first-person starfighter combat game spanning a short single-player campaign and 5v5 online dogfights, with VR support on PC and PS4 at launch.

Critics responded well to both the promise and the execution. Metacritic settled at 81, OpenCritic at 80 — comfortably strong scores, with reviewers specifically praising the flight model, the VR implementation (widely regarded as one of the best VR space-combat experiences available at the time), and a deep starfighter customization system that lets you meaningfully tune each ship's loadout. Some critics did note that as a launching-off point rather than a finished ecosystem, it left them wanting more scope — but "wanting more of a good thing" is a different complaint entirely from what dominates the Steam review corpus.

Where the Steam score actually comes from

Steam's lifetime player rating sits at Mixed, 66.5% positive of 21,084 reviews — a meaningfully lower number than the critic consensus, and the negative-review sample makes clear that gap isn't really about the flying. A recurring, specific and well-documented complaint across the entire six-year review history is EA's account login and two-factor authentication system simply failing to let paying customers into the game. "There's so much issue with trying to log in or connect your steam account to EA online services... you got to log in EVERYTIME you open the game," reads one review from 2024, four years after launch. Another, from the same year, is blunter: "the code just doesn't arrive (it's been a known issue for years, look it up)." This isn't an isolated complaint or a one-time launch hiccup — EA's own support channels have publicly acknowledged ongoing two-factor authentication problems affecting multiple titles beyond this one, which corroborates what the review corpus has been describing since 2020: an account system that has never been fully reliable, on a game that requires it to function at all.

A second, more specific technical complaint is a campaign-blocking bug: a review from November 2021, over a year after launch, describes a black-screen glitch during mission 10 that "still after all this time hasn't been fixed by EA," preventing story completion entirely for players who hit it — and notes being denied a Steam refund because the crash happened after the two-hour playtime window had already elapsed on an otherwise-working game.

Multiplayer's own leaver-penalty problem

Squadrons' 5v5 online mode drew real praise from critics at launch, but by 2022 reviewers were describing a structural problem the population decline created on its own: a leaver-penalty system designed to discourage players from quitting mid-match now works against anyone whose connection drops involuntarily. "If your internet cuts out, game crashes or you have to leave a match early for whatever reason you will be permanently banned from playing... [and] paired with other 'leavers,' because the game's population is so low," reads a 2022 review describing exactly that death spiral — a system built for a healthy population turning punitive once the population it was designed around no longer exists.

How it's aged: a complete game, quietly

Set the technical complaints aside, and Squadrons' business-model restraint has aged well in a way that's worth crediting explicitly. EA Motive kept its word: a handful of free balance patches landed after launch and then, as promised, support wound down — no DLC ever appeared, no microtransaction layer was ever bolted on, and the NZ$49.95 you paid in 2020 is still the entire transaction six years later. Community retrospectives written years after launch describe the game in similar terms: a smaller, quieter, more dedicated community than it had at launch, but one that doesn't remember the game as a failure or an abandoned project — a Star Wars game that, unusually for the license, actually launched finished and stayed that way. It's now available at a steep, honest 90% discount rather than being propped up with sales events for ongoing paid content that was never coming.

Verdict

STAR WARS: Squadrons earned its strong critic scores honestly: a well-regarded flight model, genuinely good VR support, and a business model refreshingly free of the live-service pressure that defines most of its peers. The gap between that critical reception and its more divided Steam score isn't really a disagreement about the core game — it's a real, years-documented account-login failure and a specific unpatched campaign bug that locked a meaningful number of paying customers out of what they bought, compounded by a multiplayer population thin enough to make its own anti-quitting system punish innocent players. At its current price, this is an easy recommendation for the flying alone — just verify your EA login actually works before you count on the campaign.