STAR WARS™ Starfighter™

Aged worse a new hope's visual effects

Game should take you no more than 2-4 hours. My game time is not representative of actual playtime as it both not closing when xd out of and taking breaks due to the final level. Version: Steam (PS2-based port) Score: 3/5 — Fun 2/3 · Mechanics 0.4/1 · Graphical Fidelity 0.25/0.5 · Story & Music 0.35/0.5 Starfighter is a side story wedged in just before and through The Phantom Menace, following a Naboo pilot, a Trade Federation-hired mercenary, and a pirate crew across a run of dogfight and strike missions. On PC it's the 2002 port of the original PS2 build, not the enhanced Xbox Special Edition, and it shows: even quitting doesn't cleanly kill the process — it keeps running in the background until closed via Steam or Task Manager. Flight controls are genuinely fluid — full pitch/yaw/roll, responsive boost and braking, no complaints there. The problem is what happens the moment you take a hit: a stunlock state you cannot act your way out of, full stop, with no tie to frame rate. Pair that with medium-and-up AI accuracy so precise it makes Perfect Dark's infamous cheating bot look fair by comparison — at least those shots could be dodged — and several stretches turn into surviving scripted damage rather than playing well. The final mission is the worst of it: multiple sessions ended in deaths with no clear cause, forcing repeated breaks just to get through it. Bonus missions require gold-medaling their parent story missions to unlock and aren't worth the effort for what they are — skippable. Graphically it's clean: no glitches, crisp rendering, nothing visually broken. Environments are bland, but that's a CD-space limitation shared by every Star Wars game of this console generation, not unique to this one. The music is standard, recognizable Star Wars score, audibly compressed for CD. Overall: a functional, occasionally fun dogfighter buried under an unreasonable damage-response system and a rough PC port, worth it mainly for the novelty of the pre-Phantom Menace side story. Footnote — fixing the sound and level-breaking bugs: System audio must be set to 16-bit, 44.1kHz (CD quality), or the intro logo, menus, and anything outside the main game sessions play silently. Separately, in-game resolution must be set to native PS2 (640x480) — anything higher and levels break outright with total loss of in-level sound, likely a shared-memory dependency inherited from the PS2 hardware. This doesn't force your actual display down to 640x480, though: the game still renders fullscreen at your native monitor resolution and looks normal — it's an internal engine value only.