Star Wars Starfighter Missions is a casual shoot-em-up where players lead their starfighter squadrons through various missions loosely related to the Dark Side vs Light Side conflict. Its simple gameplay and the repetitive enemy attack patterns won't earn the game much love from hardcore shmup fans, but there’s a simple satisfaction to completing the short, linear stages, even if they don’t provide much of a challenge.

In Starfighter Missions, players collect starfighter pilots that they can assign to squadrons. Each squadron can have up to 3 pilots: one leader and two wingmen. Pilots have a power level that affects their starfighter’s stats, and this number can be increased by increasing pilot levels and upgrading starfighter parts. A squadron's power level is the sum of all its pilots’ individual power levels.

Each stage has a suggested power level indicating its difficulty, though they don’t actually become harder as power levels increase. All a higher suggested power level means is that enemy starfighters deal more damage and can take more of a beating. Once you’ve leveled up your squadron, these higher-level stages become just as easy as the low-level ones. It's artificially increasing a game’s difficulty through stat-padding, which feels almost sacrilegious considering the shoot-em-up genre’s focus on mechanical skill.

Yet, despite the simplistic mechanics and shallow gameplay, the first few hours of Starfighter Missions are still a lot of fun. As is typical of casual, free-to-play mobile games, the game begins by showering the player with positive feedback. Players start the game with one pilot, Biggs Darklighter, who is incredibly overpowered for this stage of the game. You’ll spend the next half-hour or so absolutely crushing everything in your path until the game gives you new pilots and the ability to assign them to multiple squadrons.

Joymax has shown a great deal of respect for the Star Wars property. Everything from the character portraits to the in-game menus and the starfighters look amazing in-game. This incredible attention to detail deserves praise. In fact, Joymax only falters when it comes time for them to make their own, original contributions to the Starfighter Mission’s universe: the script and dialogue.

The script, short as it may be, needs another lookover by an editor. Most of the conversations, aside from a brief cameo from Princess Leia, involve C3-PO and R2D2 leading you through a

clumsy explanation of the game's various mechanics. No, it never gets as bad as Zero Wing, but you know something needs fixing when Leia Organa refers to points as scores.

Monetisation Model of the "Star Wars: Starfighter Missions"

Starfighter Missions uses a monetisation model that is almost exclusively built around in-app purchases. No surprises there – it is a gacha game, after all. You have your typical system of multiple currencies: one free currency and a premium currency. The free currency, Credits, is used almost exclusively to upgrade ship parts and skills. Meanwhile, Crystals are the primary premium money used to pay for almost everything else.

There are a few things that Starfighter Missions does a bit differently than other games in the free-to-play space. The first is that there are barely any rewarded video ads, especially considering their popularity in Asia and particularly in Southeast Asia where Starfighter Missions was first made available. The rewarded ads are hidden away in your inbox, almost as if they’ve been intentionally hidden away by Joymax.

Players can claim some free currency every 24 hours from the in-game shop. In most games, this would be the perfect opportunity to play some rewarded ads. However, in Starfighter Missions, you can claim your daily currency reward once a day without watching a video or viewing an interstitial.

Watching a rewarded ad from your inbox puts a Material Lucky Box Ticket in your inventory, which ties into the second odd thing about this game: gacha tickets are surprisingly easy to obtain. Leveling your profile up and completing stages will regularly reward you with free gacha tickets. I don’t think I’ve ever unlocked this many new characters so early into my time in a free-to-play mobile game.

It’s an unorthodox choice, but one that can be easily made up for with some gacha probability tweaking and pilot balancing. I’m obviously not privy to the drop rates of each pilot, but from what I’ve observed, pilots are largely similar at lower levels -- i.e. their stats don’t vary that much. It’s only at the higher levels after the player has invested in leveling them up that the stat differences become apparent. Additionally, progressing beyond the early stages requires careful distribution of your experience points across several starfighters in several squadrons. Unlocking one powerful starfighter just isn’t as effective as upgrading several decent ones (which also costs premium currency for leveling up and materials).

By Andi Nuruljihad for Gamesforum