Star Citizen's single-player mode, Squadron 42, has made a reappearance with a new trailer showing off the mode's impressive cast and interstellar warfare. In development for 12 years, the ambitious mode blends outer space dogfighting and first-person action, set during an era when hostile alien forces have pushed humanity to the brink of defeat. As a rising star in the United Empire of Earth Navy, players must push back the invaders and save the day.
The new trailer is the best look yet at the mode and the many, many actors who play various characters in the story mode. From Mark Hamill (who knows a thing or two about space combat) to Gary Oldman, the rest of the cast also includes Gillian Anderson, Ben Mendelsohn, Henry Cavill, Andy Serkis, John Rhys-Davies, Rhona Mitra, and more famous faces in the mix. For the player characters, Ian Duncan (Broken News) plays the male player character, while Alix Wilton Regan (the new face and voice of Tomb Raider games) portrays the female player character.
With development being led by Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts at Cloud Imperium Games, the trailer includes a healthy mix of cinematics and gameplay, showing off on-foot sections, life aboard the capital ship that players will be stationed on, minigames, and the space combat that fans of the genre have shown up for. There's no solid release date yet for the mode, but a Q2 2027 release window is listed instead, and you can wishlist it now on the CIG website and Steam. As of 2023, CIG described the standalone campaign as feature-complete, and the team said it was working on "dialing in" the gameplay so it would feel as "immersive as possible."
Squadron 42 has been brewing in the background ever since Star Citizen was first announced, with the mode seemingly being close to release earlier this year and then getting a delay to 2027 so that it could escape being overshadowed by GTA 6--which to be fair, is a strategy that many games have opted for recently.
"Much like the rest of the industry there is no way I want to launch my spiritual successor to Wing Commander, a game that has had 12 years of blood, sweat and tears invested into it, launching into the attention buzz saw of GTA 6," Roberts wrote in a blog post earlier this year. "While GTA 6 isn’t launching on PC this November, pretty much all outlets and most content creators will be all over it, not leaving a lot of room for other coverage."
Development on Star Citizen is still ongoing, and the game has raised over $1 billion in funding since it was first announced. A large chunk of that cash comes from CIG selling spaceships that can cost as much as $5,000 each, money that the game's devoted fanbase is happy to spend on the project. Worryingly, Star Citizen was in the spotlight after a recent developer livestream intended to show the game off in a positive light.
But instead of seeing what Star Citizen could be, the gameplay shown off was littered with bugs, glitches, and palpable tension between the developers as they attempted to salvage the broadcast.