Best Games - Star Wars: Squadrons

If a VR experience can make you ill, maybe more of that experience can set you right again.

At least that was the hypothesis I was testing when I kept playing Star Wars: Squadrons well past the point where I was alternating hot and cold sweats, dry mouth, and motion induced dizziness. Piloting an X-Wing or Tie Fighter, even in smooth and languid dogfights turned my stomach. At first.

I pushed past the discomfort, because the game was so engaging and compelling. There are plenty of space combat games, even some Star Wars ones, but Squadrons was the first game that made me feel like I was actually in an X-Wing.

I did tap out pretty quickly that first time, but the feeling of sitting in a Tie Interceptor’s ball cockpit or looking down the nose of a Y-Wing was just too cool. Motion sick or not, that was a feeling I had to come back to.

So I did. Over and over again. I finished the campaign, and even played a few online matches. By the time I was nearing the end of the game’s main story, I was deliberately pulling off intense turns and rolls through floating wreckage. I was scraping the deck of massive Star Destroyers. I would look for places to weave in and around asteroids and capital ships, flipping over so I could get the canopy of my ship uncomfortably close to disaster.

Other than feeling excited and a little light headed, I never felt sick again. I pushed past it.

If the game were even half as good as it is, I doubt that I would have risked the motion sickness. There have been a small number of games and experiences in VR that would make me feel ill, and I would usually drop them pretty quickly. There was just no reason to make myself feel bad.

Star Wars Squadrons feels that good to play. It is so much fun that I turned the motion sickness knob until I broke it off.

I suppose you can also play it on a screen, but why would you want to do that. If you can feel like you sitting in one of the Star Wars fighters, why wouldn’t you?

Star Wars: Squadrons, at least in VR, is certainly one of the Best Games.