Star Wars: Galactic Racer

The horror and trauma of decades of warfare is over. The Empire has fallen and peace reigns...which means a return to prominence for the Galactic Racing League. Speeder racers from across the galaxy converge for a new championship, but the rich family of spoiled brat Kestar Bool has basically bought him the championship. Organiser Darius Pax hires the racer Shade to take the fight to Bool, if he can.

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: a racing game in the Star Wars universe, and a spiritual successor to Star Wars Episode I: Racer (1999). The development pedigree is impressive, with new company Fuse Games assembling a team of top talent from other racing games, with a majority coming from the Burnout franchise.

Galactic Racer does some interesting things with its premise. The main gameplay mode is the single player campaign, which combines a narrative story with roguelite elements. The player takes part in a tournament consisting of multiple races but losing certain events means losing a token; lose all your tokens and you fail the entire season, and have to wait to start the next tournament to rejoin the fray. Early in the game you only have one token, so losing an event is an insta-fail condition. But, whilst you lose your upgrades for the season, you keep any permanent upgrades you make to your vehicle between tournaments, plus of course you as the player get better and better as you go along. You need to win three tiers of tournaments to complete the game, though once you've completed one tier, you automatically start at the next (i.e. once you've beaten the first tier, all future resets will be to the start of the second tier until you complete it, and then the third; you don't need to complete all three tiers in one go, for the sake of sanity and any furniture near you). You can also start grudges with other characters, eventually forcing them to agree to a duel. Defeating them means taking a token from them. Certain sponsors also provide you with additional tokens, so you can fail one or two token events per run and still have a shot at victory.

This structure is surprisingly compelling, and the game is successful at nailing that "fail by doing," angle. When you fail a run, you usually know exactly how and why you failed, and how to succeed next time, nailing the appeal of games like Hades and Frostpunk in a completely different genre. This also makes the single-player campaign surprisingly chunky. It took me 20 hours to finally beat it, which doesn't seem unusual. That's a decent amount of SP content compared to most racing games, where the SP material is fairly limited with the main focus on multiplayer.

You have a choice of three vehicles to race, namely a speeder, a bike or a skimmer. Certain flashback missions also give you access to a Phantom Menace-style podracer. Each vehicle can be customised, though for the most part changing models only has an aesthetic effect. You get actual new parts for your vehicles through the game from winning events, and can also buy new parts from your mechanic or new rare parts from the specialised merchant (who also repairs your vehicle). You can also tweak certain characteristics between each race, though which characteristic you want to tweak is randomised. Also, oddly, you can only buy new parts or engage in repairs between planets, or if you visit the merchant at the expense of not taking part in a race.

This does lead into Galactic Racer's arguable biggest weakness. There are a lot of elements in this title which are "gameified," that is, it does things for game balance that have no basis in actual logic. Not being able to repair damage between races is infuriating, and strictly limiting when you can buy new gear is weird. If your engineer doesn't have any good parts, you need to pay an ever-increasing amount to reset the pool, which means you frequently waste your bank balance resetting the pool only to find you can't now buy the parts for your favourite setup. What this means in practice is that you may find a favoured setup which dominates one run but on the next, the randomisation means you can never achieve that setup again, which is annoying. It does encourage you to try different tactics and approaches, which is good, but if you've hit on the perfect ramjet build, not being able to recreate it again just feels aggravating.

Fortunately, the actual racing is excellent. Handling is solid and responds well to upgrades, and knowing when to deploy your afterburner versus your ramjet becomes a key strategy. Sliding around corners and then boosting out via ramjet feels fantastic and the game gives you a tremendous sense of speed. Getting into "the zone" as you learn the tracks and know exactly where and when to boost can be very satisfying. The three vehicle types respond differently and require different lines, and the podracers you fly in the flashback missions are genuinely unhinged, incredibly powerful monsters constantly on the verge of killing you or other racers, or both. The only disappointment here is opposition AI, which is rarely threatening, with the game resorting to the groan-inducing tactic of "rubberbanding" (mysteriously teleporting opponents you've really left utterly in the dust close enough behind you to keep things interesting) to keep them in the game.

For a racing game, there's a lot of good writing and characterisation here. The eleven other racers in the league gradually become more familiar over multiple runs, with some emerging as enemies, some as allies, some as frenemies, and some as, er, Biddy Blas. Some will also be vicious competitors on the track but turn on the charm off it (between runs you can wander around the paddock and converse with other characters). Do enough runs and you will have the opportunity to defeat them all in one-on-one duels. The flashback missions, which explore the life and misadventures of a Phantom Menace side-character, are also well-characterised, adding a lot of depth to the one-note racers from that movie. 

Graphically, the game is superb, the only issue being occasional readability on some of the tracks where the track limits are not clearly delineated. This is more of a problem on Jakku than the other tracks, and also an issue more with graphics options that can make the details smeary at a distance. The game also defaults to having the cinematic camera on, which is a nice idea but a damned liability mid-race and killed me more times than any competitor. Fortunately you can turn it off. Music and sound effects are also outstanding.

Star Wars: Galactic Racer (****) is a great arcade game, with a lot of customisability. The story and characters are much stronger than expected, it has an infectious sense of humour and fun, and the game has a ridiculous "one more race" feel that may cause serious sleep disruption. Some of the progression mechanics feel harsh for their own sake, and graphically some tracks have issues with not always making it clear in time where the hell the limits are. But these are mostly minor irritants. The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

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Star Wars: Zero Company

The Clone Wars rage across the galaxy, with the Galactic Republic and its vast clone armies pitted against the Separatists under Count Dooku. In the midst of the chaos, small mercenary outfits are trying to survive. Zero Company, founded by ex-Republic soldiers dismissed after a military operation went south, is reliant on loans from the Hutts and finding itself spiralling into insolvency when it is given a lifeline by Republic Intelligence. The Republic will pay their debts in full if Zero Company works to bring down a mysterious cult known as the Infinite Coil, a distraction the Republic military can ill afford to engage at the moment. With little choice, Zero Company agrees.

Way back in 2012, when playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown from Firaxis, I thought "a Star Wars version of this would be cool." Modders agreed, and even other franchises, with Gears of War and Warhammer 40,000 both getting their own turn-based tactics spin-offs years before the galaxy far, far away (and Fallout Tactics, released in 2001, can smirk at being way ahead of the curve). But finally it's happened. We have "XCOM, but also Star Wars." And it's great! Mostly.

Zero Company is a turn-based tactics game in the Star Wars universe that has you controlling a mercenary outfit at the height of the Clone Wars. You have to manage your base, such as upgrading facilities or getting better supplies, whilst also recruiting and training new troops. You also have to manage your company's reputation on the galaxy map, increasing your influence in key areas to unlock new abilities. You have minor operations you can undertake, which are mostly text-based, with you sending troops to do a quick job for a fast infusion of cash or resources, and then proper missions, where you deploy to a planet for a full, turn-based mission. You control a character call "Hawks," who is fully customisable, and the only character in the game who can't be killed (if you die, it's reload time).

The metagame at your base is quite fun, and shows DNA from both the XCOM games and also the same team's last game, the solid-but-flawed Midnight Suns. You run around upgrading your base and capabilities but you can also talk to all your soldiers, learning their backstories and making dialogue choices that can improve or lower your bonds with them. Improving bonds unlocks new ability points, or allows you to improve damage or hit points or other bonuses for missions. Unlike Midnight Suns, your base is relatively small so it's easy to talk to everyone in a few minutes between missions, and you don't have to start a book club. Also, the writing and dialogue is far superior, making this part of the game less of a slog.

The actual strategic gameplay from XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2 is sadly missing here. You don't get to make many actual strategic choices. The most you can do is delay a key story mission (every mission has a timer showing how long you have to take it) a couple of extra turns to fit in some more side-missions or companion missions, but beyond that you have a linear series of missions you have to perform, you can just fudge exactly when.

These three mission types dominate the game. Side-missions mostly involve going to a certain planet and either blowing something up, stealing something, rescuing some dudes or just wiping out all the enemies present. Companion missions are in the vein of Mass Effect 2's loyalty missions, you have key characters on your team with their own set of missions and goals, and helping them fulfil those goals improves their morale and increases your bonds. Your companions in Zero Company are almost uniformly excellent and interesting, so helping them all out is a lot of fun. Finally, the main story missions push forward the main narrative.

You have different types of companion characters. The narrative ones are assigned to your squad automatically and have their own cut scenes, tons of unique dialogue, loyalty metres etc. Astonishingly, they can all be killed in combat and the game will rock on without them. You also have a huge number of recruitable side-characters, who can fill out the roster (up to a possible maximum of 20). To be honest, this is wholly unnecessary and I got by with the narrative companion characters and then two extras, one of whom I literally never had to use. At different points in the narrative, some side-characters will leave for a while on their own side-missions, forcing you to dig deeper in your reserve bench, but there are usually ways of getting them back. Particularly fun are the droid companions. Droids have limited combat utility themselves, but are epic support characters, able to give other characters more action points or dolling out grenades and healing items, which they have a much higher capacity for. There's even an achievement for completing a mission with 4 droids, which is tricky but doable.

The actual missions themselves are very XCOM-ish. You have three action points per character, which can be spent moving, attacking or using items. You also have an Advantage metre. You build Advantage through base upgrades, or defeating enemies on the field. When you have a certain number of Advantage points, you can trigger special attacks and abilities which do not require action points. Judicious use of Advantage points can give your team a truly huge number of things to do each mission before the enemy finally get to take their go.

This is fun and hugely gameable, especially when you start working out how to optimise base upgrades to increase your Advantage points per mission, or how to reduce the Advantage costs for your most heavily-used abilities. However, it is very generous to your characters, even on the harder difficulty levels. Zero Company is the turn-based-tactics game as a power fantasy, instead of the cruel, head-banging exercise in frustration the genre can often be. You have very powerful synergy abilities of the kind you only unlock towards the end of an XCOM 2: War of the Chosen playthrough almost immediately at the start of the game, and they just get more powerful from there. Enemy abilities can be formidable, it has to be said, and on the harder difficulty levels the enemy AI can be quite canny in how it attacks, although sometimes the game also gives up and just hurls meatwaves (and metalwaves) at you instead, which can be more tedious.

Enemy variety is also a bit lacking, with you fighting droids, Infinite Coil members (who have funky powers to absorbe one another's energy), Separatist soldiers and street thugs and that's about it. Once you've taken down some super battle droids, droidekas and Infinite Coil heavies, the game has relatively little to surprise you with. On the other hand, you also have allies you can fight alongside, such as mercenaries, security forces, clone troopers and, on one memorable mission, a high-ranking Jedi themselves.

The game's length may also be somewhat contentious. This is launching at a cheaper-than-normal price point, which is nice, but a single playthrough of the game will take between 25 and 30 hours. There is enough variety in the game to warrant maybe a second playthrough at a higher difficulty level, maybe using a completely different A-team of characters (like dismissing the Mandalorian character who can curb-stomp many missions by herself), but beyond that there isn't enough variety to really warrant additional playthroughs. In contrast, XCOM: Enemy Unknown itself (especially with the Enemy Within expansion) is still mightily replayable fourteen years after release because of how open the strategic megagame is, not to mention an extensive mod scene. I'd argue if you want a much more open-ended, mercenary-managing, space opera war extravaganza, then BattleTech is a stronger bet with a lot more replayability as well as a truly immense mod collection.

But we are short on great Star Wars games these days, and Zero Company (****½) has superb gameplay, great characters, pretty good writing and a compelling main plot that a non-Star Wars fan can follow immediately whilst hardcore fans will appreciate deep lore cuts and obscure canon characters returning. It's immense fun, and not every game has to be some 200+ hour infinite title. The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Note: Zero Company launched with significant technical problems including frequent crashes, missions freezing and even crashes requiring a hard system reset. I would have marked the game down for this but an initial patch appears to have solved the most annoying and repetitive problems.

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Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu

Din Djarin, famed as "The Mandalorian," and his diminutive ward Grogu are working for the New Republic, bringing down Imperial warlords and war criminals in the lawless Outer Rim. His latest commission sees him reluctantly working with the Hutts to rescue the lost son of Jabba the Hutt so he can get information on an Imperial fugitive. Several reversals of fortune see Djarin with a bounty on his head from the most powerful crime lords in the galaxy.

The Mandalorian & Grogu is the first Star Wars movie in seven years, since the critical misfire of The Rise of Skywalker, despite multiple attempts to bring different projects to the screen in the interim. The film started as the fourth season of The Mandalorian, the hit TV show that established Disney+ as a serious player in the streaming wars, but was condensed down by director-writer Jon Favreau and writer-producer Dave Filoni at the behest of Lucasfilm and Disney, who were rather desperate to get a new Star Wars project on the screen, no matter the cost.

I suspect that as the fourth season of The Mandalorian, we'd have seen more extensive tie-ins with the established lore, a return for key characters and a furtherance of the show's main story arcs. As a stand-alone movie that cannot assume anyone watching it has seen even a single minute of The Mandalorian, the film has to jettison anything that even risks being vaguely confusing to create a perfectly stand-alone adventure. The result is a film that takes no risks and, more than once, made me ponder if some of the dialogue, visuals and pacing had been created by AI.

The Mandalorian & Grogu is the safest of safe choices, a perfectly adequate succession of action set-pieces, daring captures and escapes, and choice deployment of nostalgia bombs to make viewers giggle because a character has dropped a key catchphrase or deployed a fan-favourite vehicle. The amount of bombast on display is sometimes impressive, and those complaining the movie feels like an episode of the TV series may need to revisit the TV show to realise just how relatively constrained its action set pieces could be. Here, unshackled by such budgetary considerations (though this is still the cheapest Star Wars movie since Return of the Jedi, adjusted for inflation), we get an at-times exhausting succession of gun battles, fights with creatures, fights with droids and, er, WWE-style pro-wrestling scenes with Hutts.

The sheer volume of action and CGI set pieces is there to disguise the thinness of the plot. The Mando goes to one place to rescue one guy and then goes somewhere else to capture someone else, but annoys some other guys who try to capture him etc etc. To mimic the TV show, dialogue is stripped-back but the writers confuse minimalism with triteness, with the film featuring some of the weakest dialogue of any Star Wars movie to date. Rotta the Hutt gives almost the exact same speech about being his "own man" (despite being a giant space slug, albeit an absolute ripped one, guy is shredded) twice, for no apparent reason. Virtually every utterance in the movie is either an intended zinger (landing with the accuracy of a drunk stormtrooper) or rote exposition. This may be the least-quotable Star Wars movie to date...which given the competition includes the prequel and sequel trilogies, and Solo, is really saying something. The lack of good dialogue is also a problem for the actors: Pedro Pascal is at least used to being taciturn and Sigourney Weaver is too much experience to let it throw her, but Jeremy Allen White has nothing to work with as Rotta and turns in such a flat performance it feels like placeholder dialogue. The colour grading is also poor, making this easily the flattest and least-dynamic-looking Star Wars movie of them all.

Still, there's something to be said for the straightforwardness of the film at a time when a lot of films seem to get tripped up on convoluted storytelling or lore density. There are some nods at other media - a bunch of the X-wing pilots from The Mandalorian show up, alongside Zeb from Star Wars: Rebels and Rotta himself from the Clone Wars TV show - but nothing too outrageous, and the film does not outsay its welcome, even if a couple of action set-pieces and an overlong recuperation sequence could have been jettisoned to make for a tighter movie. One thing the film does do well is further the characterisation of Grogu, who here is shown to be more capable of understanding the Mandalorian's instructions and is a lot more capable of undertaking his own solo adventures. He has more to do here than simply stand around looking cute, which is a relief.

Watched as a standalone Mandalorian adventure, this is perfectly serviceable. As the next great hope for Star Wars in the cinema, it whelms at best. But maybe after the commercial and creative misfires of Solo and The Rise of Skywalker, that's just what Disney wanted.

The Mandalorian & Grogu (***) might be the most serviceable slice of Star Wars yet made, a perfectly adequate way of wasting two hours that is rarely outstanding, occasionally mediocre, but mostly inoffensive. Young children may enjoy the film more for Grogu's antics. I would definitely wait on Disney+ for this one.

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Kathleen Kennedy steps down as the boss of Lucasfilm

After fourteen years, Kathleen Kennedy has stepped down as the head of Lucasfilm, passing the reigns to Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan.

Kennedy has had a storied career in Hollywood, which began in the late 1970s working in TV before becoming John Milius's assistant. Through Milius she met Steven Spielberg, who employed her as a secretary but was impressed by her grasp of storytelling. She gradually got bigger roles, going from assistant on Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) to producer on E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). She co-founded Amblin Entertainment with Spielberg and her future husband Frank Marshall in 1982.

She worked closely with Spielberg on most of his movies, and some with husband Marshall. In early 2012 she was recruited by George Lucas to become co-chair of Lucasfilm Ltd. when it was still an independent company. On 30 October that year, Lucas sold the company to Disney and retired, with Kennedy becoming President.

Charged with succeeding George Lucas and revitalising the success of Star Wars, her approach of identifying talented film-makers and giving them creative freedom initially achieved success: The Force Awakens (2015) and The Last Jedi (2017) were smash hits at the box office (the former still being the biggest movie ever at the American box office), and the former received critical acclaim (despite concerns over its conservative approach to the Star Wars greatest hits). The Last Jedi took much bigger creative swings but only achieved mixed critical success, becoming the most divisive of all Star Wars films. Rogue One (2016) was a success on both fronts, and the first live-action Star Wars TV series, The Mandalorian (2019 - present) was also a hit on her watch and helped launch the Disney+ streaming service to great success.

Unfortunately, The Rise of Skywalker (2019) received a critical drubbing and the film only achieved half the box office of The Force Awakens. Even worse, Solo (2018) had already become the first Star Wars movie to lose money at the box office. TV shows The Book of Boba Fett (2021), Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022) and The Acolyte (2024) also all underwhelmed. Outside of Star Wars, other Lucasfilm properties stumbled: the TV series Willow (2022) was written off as a tax exercise and removed from Disney+ altogether just a few weeks after release, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) underwhelmed at the box office, despite a reasonable critical reception.

To what degree Kennedy should be blamed for these failures remains a fierce point of contention among fans, with it being pointed out that changes in leadership at Disney with wildly different demands for the amount of content caused problems for not just Lucasfilm but also Marvel. More recent Star Wars projects have also been more successful: Andor (2022-25) has been critically lauded as the best Star Wars work of all time in some quarters, whilst Skeleton Crew (2024) was also warmly received critically, though its viewership on Disney+ was not strong (but at least it hasn't been removed from it).

Kennedy confirmed the transition period actually began two years ago, with the plan being to split her role in two: Dave Filoni will take over creative control of the franchise and Lynwen Brennan, formerly of ILM, will handle business affairs. Filoni started work on Star Wars on the Clone Wars TV show (2008-14, 2020) and Star Wars: Rebels (2014-18) before moving over to live-action as a writer, producer (and sometimes actor) on The Mandalorian.

Kennedy also has a foot in the door on forthcoming projects: she is a producer on The Mandalorian & Grogu, a movie spin-off from The Mandalorian due out this May, and Star Wars: Starfighter, due in 2027.

During her departure interview with Deadline, Kennedy also gave a brief update on other percolating projects. James Mangold's is on hold, apparently taking a wild swing with the Star Wars universe. His script is rumoured to be the Jedi origin story, set tens of thousands of years before the rest of the franchise. Taika Waititi has submitted a comedic script but the greenlight has not been given. Donald Glover has also submitted a script, and Steve Soderbergh and Adam Driver are pushing a script written by Scott Burns expanding on Kylo Ren, although this project is believed to be on hold. Simon Kinberg's project is still in active development, with a recent total rewrite of the treatment. More intriguingly, Kennedy confirmed that conversations have happened with David Fincher and Vince Gilligan over them doing takes on the franchise.

STAR WARS: FATE OF THE OLD REPUBLIC announced

A new Star Wars video game has been announced at the 2025 Game Awards.

Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic is an action-RPG successor to Knights of the Old Republic I and II, and is directed by Casey Hudson, who was the project director on the original Knights of the Old Republic (as well as the Mass Effect trilogy). His new studio Arcanaut is developing the game alongside Lucasfilm Games.

In an interview, Hudson confirms the game is very early in development and is not a direct sequel to the existing games, but is a successor in a similar time period.

No release date has been set so far.

Next STAR WARS movie gets its first trailer

The trailer for the next Star Wars movie has been unveiled. The Mandalorian and Grogu is the first Star Wars cinematic release since 2019's much-criticised The Rise of Skywalker, and also acts as a continuation of the three-season Mandalorian TV show on Disney+.

The Mandalorian and Grogu stars Pedro Pascal as Din Djarin aka "The Mandalorian," a bounty hunter with a strict code of honour. In the film he continues to act as the guardian of Grogu, a powerful infant Force-user of the same species as Yoda. Sigourney Weaver co-stars as Ward, the head of the New Republic's Adelphi Rangers, whilst The Bear's Jeremy Allen White plays Rotta the Hutt, the son of the deceased Jabba (Rotta previously appears as a baby in The Clone Wars animated film). Jonny Coyne will play an Imperial warlord, the film's likely primary antagonist. It's unknown if other castmembers from The Mandalorian TV show will recur.

The film is directed by Jon Favreau and co-written by Favreau and Dave Filoni. Ludwig Göransson returns from the TV show to score.

The film will break the curse that has afflicted Star Wars theatrical releases since The Rise of Skywalker's release. Numerous movies have been in development and been cancelled or indefinitely delayed, including Rogue Squadron, multiple trilogies from Rian Johnson, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. One of the films, about Obi-Wan Kenobi, pivoted from film to TV in the development phase.

A fourth season of The Mandalorian has been written but was delayed due to the Writers' Strike, with the idea of doing a movie floated as a way of getting Star Wars back into the cinema (as the first two seasons of the show represented a rare critical high point for the franchice, alongside Andor) and it's unclear if the film will replace it altogether. The movie is intended to be a stand-alone and will reportedly not require extensive knowledge of the Star Wars franchise or The Mandalorian in particular to be enjoyed.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu will hit cinemas on 22 May 2026. A further film, Star Wars: Starfighter, is now in production starring Ryan Gosling, Amy Adams and Matt Smith and is slated for release on 28 May 2027.

The next Star Wars television series expected to air is Season 2 of Ahsoka, which is also currently filming and expected to debut in 2026.

Andor: Season 2

The Rebel Alliance is starting to take shape. Senator Mon Mothma and her allies are gathering political backing in the Galactic Senate, whilst Luthen Rael is getting his hands dirty with scheming and planning. The Empire itself is working in secret on a project of tremendous scale, requiring immense resources, including the strip-mining of the planet Ghorman, which becomes an early flashpoint in this struggle. Rebel operative Cassian Andor finds himself drawn back into Luthen's schemes, as he charts his course towards his ultimate fate.

The first season of Star Wars: Andor was a surprise, an adult and intelligent take on the Star Wars mythos that emphasised intelligent characters, interesting storytelling and a vibe that was more 1970s thriller than colourful space opera. "Star Wars as a premium HBO show from their golden age," was a common description. It was also designed to set up a planned five-year arc. Due to variable streaming figures, a significant budget and an immense production timeline, showrunner Tony Gilroy and star Diego Luna agreed to wrap the show up with the second season instead.

Compressing four seasons of television into one is a tough job, but here Gilroy and his writers make a virtue of it. The twelve-episode season (and it's an unalloyed joy to have a decent-length season of television again) is divided into four arcs of three episodes each, effectively meaning four movies back-to-back getting us from the end of the first season to the events of Rogue One. The result is focused and disciplined, with us seeing four important snapshots showing the evolution of the Galactic Empire into a fully repressive fascist state, and the Rebel Alliance into a viable military threat.

There's so much going on in Andor between these four arcs that it can be hard to pare it down. We have Cassian and Bix's domestic life, constantly interrupted by missions for Luthen. There's Luthen and Kleya's intelligence operations (Elizabeth Dulau emerges as the season's MVP, especially in the closing episodes), and Mon Mothma's politicking in the Senate. There's internal politics as the Imperial Security Bureau. There's the slowly-gathering rebels on Ghorman, who don't have a clue about what they're doing. There's Director Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn chewing the scenery with aplomb) throwing around his authority to get his secret project made. But the show moves between these different storylines with skill. There's also little filler or flab. To quote another show, all the pieces matter.

That's not to say it's completely golden perfection. Cassian spends a chunk of the first two episodes bogged down with some would-be rebels who seem to have learned everything from Keystone Cops, in a storyline that drags a little. The time jumps between each set of episodes can leave a bunch of storylines feeling unresolved. Mon Mothma's domestic life with her husband and daughter early on is left dangling in the breeze (with a coda showing her husband re-married feeling like an apologetic sop to viewers invested in that story). A major speech Mon Mothma makes is hyped but we never hear it, because it was already made on animated series Rebels and they didn't want to repeat themselves.

But such quibbles are overshadowed by everything it does right. Luthen's increasingly ruthless scheming (Stellan Skarsgard should walk away with every award going), Dedra and Syril's bizarrely watchable relationship and Major Partagaz's troubles managing the semi-incompetent ISB (Anton Lesser an under-sung hero of the show, as he was in Game of Thrones, The Crown and Wolf Hall). Partagaz lecturing underlings to "calibrate their enthusiasm," is one of the most amusing scenes in Star Wars history, and Director Krennic's weird interrogation tactics are very entertaining. The show also fulfils its potential as an epic tragedy, with heroes dying unmourned in the dark, and the clock ticking with palpable doom towards Rogue One where we know many of these characters will meet their fate. When several of them do survive (at least the end of this series), there's a feeling of relief. The show also delivers good action, not as much as you'd expect from Star Wars, but it instead builds tension and dread like nothing else in the franchise before finally pushing the button.

Andor tells a story of authoritarianism becoming ever more arbitrary, incoherent and violent, and the yearning of people for freedom and expression rising to meet it. It is a heavy story, but one that is also run through with signs of hope. A better tomorrow is possible, if people are willing to work and fight for it.

Star Wars: Andor's second season (*****) is not quite as tight as the first season, but it's bigger, more epic and more emotionally powerful, steered by outstanding actors working with excellent scripts. It's one of the best slices of Star Wars produced since 1977 and restores some faith in a franchise that has faltered too much recently. The season is available to watch now on Disney+.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

STAR WARS: ZERO COMPANY announced

Lucasfilm, Respawn and BitReactor have confirmed development of Star Wars: Zero Company, a turn-based tactics game set during the Clone Wars. The game is currently targeting a 2026 release window.

The game is basically "XCOM, but in Star Wars." The game sees players taking control of a Republic special forces group fighting the Separatists. Your initial squad of named characters (who will drive story decisions and appear in cutscenes) can be augmented by fresh recruits, who can level up as they do missions. The game will feature an ironman mode and also permadeath, which on the highest difficulty can be applied even to your named characters. On the named characters is a Jedi, one is a droid and there are at least two Clone Troopers. You lead character, Hawks, can be customised in appearance and ability.

The game is being developed by new studio BitReactor (who have veterans of the XCOM, Civilization, Gears of War and Elder Scrolls series on board) but are receiving support from Respawn, who made the recent Jedi Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor games. The game will be published by Electronic Arts.

Mighty board game series COMMAND & COLORS licences STAR WARS

The mighty Command & Colors board game series has licensed Star Wars for a themed game from Days of Wonder. Remarkably, this will only be the second time the series has licensed a property for a tie-in game, after the superb 2010 Song of Ice and Fire-themed variant Battles of Westeros.

Command & Colors is a board game/wargame hybrid. Players command two factions that engage in battle. The board is divided into three sectors and, after a deployment phase, order their armies using a randomly-drawn hand of cards, with instructions like "all units on the right flank to advance," or "one unit in each sector advances." The players' armies have different weapons and vehicles with different capabilities.

The most well-known and biggest-selling game in the series is Memoir 44, a World War II variant, followed by BattleLore, a high fantasy version of the concept. Other variants include Command & Colors: Ancients and Command & Colors: Napoleonics, covering the ancient world (Romans, Greeks etc) and the Napoleonic Wars respectively; Samurai Battles, featuring warfare in Japan; Tricorne, about the American Revolution; Battle Cry, about the American Civil War; and The Great War, which covers World War I. The most recent game in the system I played was Red Alert: Space Fleet Warfare, which was superb but extremely demanding in the amount of table space it required.

Days of Wonder have recently announced a revamp of Memoir 44, although sadly this does not appear to be an in-depth second edition that fans have been requesting for years, but a mild revision with new artwork and tokens. The new focus for the game appears to be the Star Wars tie-in game. Days of Wonder's official screenshots indicate this will be a land-based game, with the base game focusing on the Battle of Hoth, with Imperial and Rebel forces fighting for control of the planet, presumably with snowtroopers, rebel troops, snowspeeders, scout walkers and AT-ATs. I imagine if it's a hit, expansions will follow and maybe a space-based variant.

Days of Wonder are promising to release new information, such as a release window, soon.

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Star Wars: Skeleton Crew

The people of the planet At Attin are carrying out a Great Work for the Galactic Republic, which requires their planet to be sealed off from the rest of the galaxy by an unbreachable barrier. The children of At Attin are encouraged to study hard to get great jobs to carry out the Work, with only ancient stories of Jedi percolating through to reach those with imagination. When four children stumble across a buried starship which inadvertently carries them far from At Attin, they have to use all their resourcefulness to get home, through a galaxy decidedly less civilised than they were led to believe.

Skeleton Crew is yet another Star Wars TV show from the Lucasfilm/Disney+ production line. Since The Mandalorian debuted five years ago, the production line has pushed out a whole raft of Star Wars projects, which have all looked fantastic but, to varying degrees, struggled to hit the high notes of the franchise. The first season of Andor and the first two seasons of The Mandalorian were very good, but its third season, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka were all patchy, The Acolyte flawed and The Book of Boba Fett bafflingly structured.

Combined with the well-documented struggles in getting a new movie in the franchise off the ground, this has led to the conclusion that Star Wars, at least as a live-action concern, was in trouble under Disney's stewardship.

Fortunately, and most unexpectedly, Skeleton Crew didn't get that memo. Jon Watts, who masterminded Marvel's take on Spider-Man, rocked up with a mission: to make the Star Wars / 1980s kids' movie crossover event that we never knew we wanted, but it turns out was a great idea all along. Taking inspiration from the likes of The Goonies and Flight of the Navigator, the film jettisons almost all the baggage of the extended Star Wars canon that has been weighing down the rest of the franchise for a near-stand-alone adventure in which some kids find a spaceship and get into hijinks.

You might think that sounds fair enough but maybe not enough to sustain eight episodes, but Watts and his team expand the storyline to incorporate subplots revolving around the kids' families trying to work out how to find them from back home, as well as expanding on Jod, the mentor character they encounter along the way who agrees to be their guide through the dangerous galaxy beyond At Attin. Jude Law plays Jod with absolutely maximum relish, turning in a great performance that mixes humour and roguery in classic Star Wars fashion. The kids are all fine (due to their age, the occasional scene where they mistake enthusiasm for skill can be overlooked), and many of the other adult actors are great, though Kerry Condon (Rome, Better Call Saul) feels under-utilised.

The episode count allows our characters to visit several planets (all new) and learn more about the galaxy and its recent past, meaning that total Star Wars novices should be at home here. The impressive action set-pieces come thick and fast, and the lighter tone is mostly successful after too many Star Wars projects that feel weighed down by the need to be serious. But, like the best 1980s kids' movies, the show also knows it won't work without some darker moments and real jeopardy, and a late-series shakeup to its format is highly effective at darkening the show without making it unsuitable for its audience.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (****) is not high art but it achieves its objective of being breezy fun for kids and adults alike. Easily the best Star Wars TV project after Andor and the early part of The Mandalorian, it's almost a relief to find an adventure in the Galaxy Far Far Away that can simply be enjoyed and not merely tolerated. The show is airing now on Disney+ worldwide.

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STAR WARS: OUTLAWS announced

Ubisoft has formally announced a new Star Wars video game. Star Wars: Outlaws is the franchise's first open-world action game. It is set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and a cinematic shows Han Solo, frozen in carbonite, being delivered to Jabba the Hutt.

In the game, the player takes on the role of scoundrel and pirate Kay Vess. Vess gets in over her head with several crime syndicates - including possibly Jabba's - and has to live on the edge to regain her freedom.

Developed by Massive Entertainment for Ubisoft and Lucasfilm Games, the game is scheduled for release in 2024.

Lucasfilm and Disney announce three new STAR WARS films

As part of the Star Wars Celebration events in London, Lucasfilm and Disney have announced three new Star Wars live-action films are in development.

First up, and most removed from the others, is a "Biblical" story set many thousands of years prior to all existing Star Wars media. This film will be about the very first person to become a Jedi and will be directed James Mangold, best-known for his acclaimed movie Logan (2017). He also directed Cop Land (1997), Girl, Interrupted (1999) and the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023).

Dave Filoni's film will "close out" the interconnected series of stories being told in the Disney+ shows The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett and Ahsoka. The film is believed to unite all of the major characters from those series in an Avengers: Endgame-style battle against an ultimate foe, probably Grand Admiral Thrawn (who will debut first in the upcoming Disney+ series Ahsoka). Filoni is best-known for his work on the Star Wars animated shows The Clone Wars, Rebels and The Bad Batch, as well as his work on The Mandalorian and the upcoming Ahsoka. Filoni has previously only directed three episodes of The Mandalorian, one of The Book of Boba Fett and an unknown number of Ahsoka episodes, so this is a vote of confidence in his skills (intriguingly, the much-more experienced director and Mandalorian co-creator Jon Favreau is not doing this gig).

The final film will be directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy (the 3 Bahadur trilogy, Sitara: Let Girls Dream and episodes of Ms. Marvel) and will be the first new Star Wars film set after the events of Rise of Skywalker. Daisy Ridley will return as Rey and will chronicle her rebuilding of the Jedi Order, possibly with appearances by other sequel trilogy characters and other Force-using characters from the other projects. Damon Lindelof developed the first draft of the script but has since left the project.

Not mentioned is Rian Johnson's trilogy idea (although he has indicated that project is on ice until he completes his Knives Out series) nor the Rogue Squadron movie from Patty Jenkins, with some reports indicating the latter has been cancelled outright. Taika Waititi's Star Wars movie is apparently still in development, but has not been mentioned amidst these new announcements.

With the disappointing box-office for Solo (2018) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019) and numerous projects getting stuck in development hell, there was some speculation that Lucasfilm might avoid returning to the cinema with the franchise for a long time. Today's announcement indicates they have renewed faith and confidence in the franchise.

By also "closing out" the current era of TV shows and establishing new material set after The Rise of Skywalker, they may also be looking at setting up a new era for Star Wars stories where they are not locked into the events of the earlier films and shows, which can only be a good thing, otherwise we will get an origin mini-series about Admiral Ackbar at the current rate.

First trailer for STAR WARS: AHSOKA name-drops HEIR TO THE EMPIRE, introduces REBELS cast to live-action

Disney+ have dropped the first trailer for Star Wars: Ahsoka, the upcoming live-action mini-series that will focus on the fan-favourite character of Ahsoka Tano.

Ahsoka debuted in the animated Clone Wars feature film from 2008, before becoming a mainstay of the seven-season run of Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008-14, 20). She was originally voiced by Ashley Eckstein. Ahsoka is a Force-sensitive from the Togruta species, and is assigned as Anakin Skywalker's padawan (apprentice) during the Clone Wars. Some months before the end of the conflict, Ahsoka is accused of a crime she did not commit and outcast from the Jedi Order. Although exonerated, the Jedi Council's lack of faith in her shakes her confidence and she quits permanantly, neatly avoiding Order 66 and the near-extermination of the Jedi Order.

She reappears fourteen years later in Star Wars: Rebels (2014-18) as an older intelligence operative working for the Rebel Alliance and acting as a liaison with the crew of the Ghost, who are running Rebel operations on the Imperial-occupied world of Lothal. Ahsoka confronts her former master, now known as Darth Vader, and is apparently killed by him in battle. Ezra, the would-be trainee Jedi of the Ghost crew, uses a powerful time-bending device known as the World Between Worlds to rescue Ahsoka at the apparent moment of her demise and rescue her. So as not to disrupt the timeline, Ahsoka goes into hiding until after Darth Vader's demise at the battle of Endor. With Ezra's disappearance in battle with Grand Admiral Thrawn in the Rebels finale, Ahsoka joins forces with Sabine Wren, a Mandalorian warrior from the Ghost crew, to track them both down.

Ahsoka made her live-action debut in Season 2 of The Mandalorian, now played by Rosario Dawson. Ahsoka works with the Mandalorian, Din Djarin, to overcome a mutual threat. She also appears in The Book of Boba Fett, working alongside Luke Skywalker to help train Grogu in the Jedi way. However, she references the threat posed by Grand Admiral Thrawn in both series.

The trailer for Ahsoka confirms that her quest to find and eliminate the threat posed by Thrawn now takes precedence. We see her join forces with Ghost crewmembers Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), Hera Syndulla (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Chopper (Dave Filoni, probably) on a mission to find Ezra (Eman Esfandi) and Thrawn (cast, but not identified so far). Their mission will involve a journey to Lothal and meeting Baylan (Ray Stevenson) and an unknown pilot and lightsaber-wielder (Ivanna Sakhno), who may be friends or foes. They will also revisit the World Between the Worlds.

Genevieve O'Reilly also reprises her role from Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars: Andor as Mon Mothma (now, it appears, Chancellor or President of the New Republic). Diana Lee Inosanto also returns as Magistrate Morgan Elsbeth, whom debuted in Season 2 of The Mandalorian. David Tennant returns as the lightsaber-crafting droid Huyang from The Clone Wars, and Hayden Christensen will return as Anakin Skywalker (presumably in flashback).

The trailer also name-drops Heir to the Empire, the popular 1991 novel by Timothy Zahn that hugely popularised the Star Wars Expanded Universe. In that novel and its two sequels, set five years after Return of the Jedi, Grand Admiral Thrawn seizes control of the remaining Imperial factions and launches a war against the New Republic, including besieging Coruscant with cloaked asteroids which he threatens to drop on the planet. Thrawn strikes an ill-advised alliance with the mad dark Jedi clone Joruus C'boath to gain access to advanced weaponry and technology at Mount Tantiss (which recently made its new canon debut in The Bad Batch). Luke, Han, Leia, Lando and the rest of the old Rebel Alliance crowd help defeat Thrawn and Joruus in battle. Although no longer canon, the novel remains a beloved touchstone by old-skool Star Wars fans, and it might be that Ahsoka will draw on it for inspiration.

Star Wars: Ahsoka will debut in August this year on Disney+.

Ahsoka Tano Timeline

• 36 BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin): Born on Shili.
• 33 BBY: Found by Jedi Master Plo Kloon and taken to the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. Begins training.
• 22 BBY: Assigned as padawan to Anakin Skywalker at the outbreak of the Clone Wars. Also serves as a commanding officer over the 501st Legion of the Grand Army of the Republic, meeting CT-7567 “Rex” and becoming his close friend and ally (The Clone Wars).
• 20 BBY: Framed for murder and treason, banished from the Jedi Order and forced to go on the run. She clears her name and is exonerated, but feels betrayed by the Jedi Order and refuses to return. As a private citizen, she fights alongside Bo-Katan Kryze in the liberation of Mandalore. Shortly after the battle, she is betrayed by Rex during the execution of Order 66. She saves Rex from his inhibitor trip and they escape. Anakin, now Darth Vader, believes her dead in a Star Destroyer crash (The Clone Wars).
• 18 BBY: After years in hiding on the Outer Rim, Ahsoka joins Senator Bail Organa’s nascent Alliance to Restore the Republic. She becomes an intelligence specialist coordinating the activities of dozens of autonomous cells, codenamed “Fulcrum.”
• 5 BBY: Ahsoka begins working with the Lothal rebels, principally the crew of the Ghost (Rebels).
• 3 BBY: Ahsoka battles Darth Vader on Malachor, confirming he is her former master, Anakin Skywalker. Ahsoka vanishes during the battle, Vader believing her dead. In reality, she is rescued by Ezra Bridger from two years in the future, using the time-warping power of the “World Between Worlds.” Fearing her survival has changed history, Ahsoka lies low (Rebels).
• 0 BBY: Liberation of Lothal, disappearance of Grand Admiral Thrawn and Ezra Bridger (Rebels).
• 3 ABY: Destruction of the Second Death Star at the Battle of Endor and death of Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader (Return of the Jedi).
• 5 ABY: Ahsoka and Sabine Wren join forces to search for the missing Ezra Bridger in the Unknown Regions of the Galaxy (Rebels).
• 9 ABY: Adopted Mandalorian Child of the Watch Din Djarin encounters Bo-Katan Kryze during his search for the Jedi. Bo-Katan directs him to find Ahsoka Tano, whom she believes is currently located on the planet Corvus (The Mandalorian). Ahsoka aids in the training of Grogu along with Jedi Master Luke Skywalker (The Book of Boba Fett). The events of Ahsoka take place (Ahsoka).

Andor: Season 1

Fourteen years after the end of the Clone Wars, the Galactic Empire seems to be invulnarable. From Coruscant, a colossal bureaucracy rules over millions of worlds through thousands of warships and a vast number of troops. Resistance appears futile. But there are those who believe otherwise, and from the lowliest depths of the poorest planets to the halls of the Galactic Senate itself, a rebellion is taking shape. Fighting this rebellion will not be easy, or pretty, or easy, and to start it requires a single victory, small in scope but enough to start the avalanche.

When Lucasfilm was putting together its initial package of live-action Star Wars TV shows, the one about Cassian Andor, a relatively low-key character from Rogue One, always seemed like the most random and least interesting. An Obi-Wan show? Sure, that makes sense. A show about Mandalorians? Cool. A Boba Fett series? Why not? But this guy? Diego Luna gave a great performance and there were some interesting edges around this more amoral, ruthless rebel operative, but he didn't exactly seem to be screaming out for more backstory.

Andor's first season proves that guess completely wrong, and unexpectedly emerges as the best of the live-action Star Wars shows to date, knocking the underwhelming Obi-Wan and disappointing Book of Boba Fett into a cocked hat, and even shading the fun Mandalorian. Coming across as the answer to the question, "What if Star Wars was on HBO?", Andor is a serious, adult SF drama about totalitarianism, the price of freedom, the perils of resistance and ultimately how the smallest acts can have huge ramifications.

The show nominally focuses on Cassian Andor, with Diego Luna returning to play a younger, cockier version of the character from Rogue One. Flashbacks reveal his backstory as a young child on a planet left ravaged by an unexplained disaster, whilst his present-day story sees him recruited by Luthen Rael (a fantastic Stellan Skarsgård) from his adopted homeworld of Ferrix to take part in a rebel raid on the planet Aldhani. The raid triggers a massive series of reprisals by the Empire, with the Imperial Security Bureau sending its best agents to track down those responsible. Andor absconds from the cause the first chance he gets, only to wind up, ironically, getting arrested and sentenced to an Imperial prison facility under a false identity. There he has to learn to become a leader and a facilitator for his fellow inmates, and sets about recruiting the reluctant floor manager Kino Loy (an outstanding Andy Serkis) to his cause.

However, one of the show's smartest moves is using Andor as the connective tissue between the ground-level story of how the Empire is crushing the common people, exemplified by Andor himself, and a much higher-level story in the Imperial Senate, where Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly reprising her role from Rogue One and Revenge of the Sith, the only high-profile actor apart from Luna and Forest Whitaker as Saw Gerrera to return from the films) is trying to simultaneously present herself as a harmless, bleeding-heart irritant against the Emperor's tyranny whilst secretly funding the establishment of the Rebel Alliance. When the financial web she's spun to carry this out is abruptly broken, she urgently needs to find a way of covering her back before the Empire discovers and destroys the Alliance before it can even get going.

In some senses Andor is an atypical Star Wars show: there's only a single, brief space battle and only a few ground-based action scenes. Much of the show seems to revolve around taut conversations between desperate individuals. The Empire is frequently presented as a mildly boring bureaucracy packed with functionaries just trying to get through the day so they can go home, rather than psychopathic maniacs. One major storyline revolves around financial dealings and shadow accounts and distasteful criminal deals like an episode of The Wire. It's also a decidedly more adult show: sex is alluded to more than in most Star Wars material, we get our first blink-and-you'll-miss-it bit of swearing in the franchise and character motivations are much more the focus, rather than cool spaceships or droids (though we do get at least one great new spaceship and a somewhat sympathetic robot with B2EMO).

It's a bold step but also a necessary one. Star Wars is now a transmedia franchise that is clearly never going to entirely stop this side of the end of human civilisation, but it can't do that if it doesn't broaden its tonal horizons and become a much broader church than what it has been up until now. Lucasfilm has been reluctant to do that - after hiring Phil Lord and Christopher Miller to make a more comedic Star Wars movie with Solo, they panicked when the directors did exactly that and fired them - but seems to have now gotten the message. How far this will go remains unclear: will we eventually get Star Wars the romantic comedy (no, Attack of the Clones does not count) and Star Wars the horror franchise? Maybe. But starting that broadening with Star Wars: The Prestige Streaming Showcase isn't such a bad idea.

Andor works because it shows us in a very real way how day-to-day life in the Empire works. It doesn't actually appear to be that bad, as long as you keep your head down and work hard and don't speak out, and you might even get a promotion and fancy you can work inside the system to your family's benefit, or try to make things better. But the insidiousness of the Empire is clear, as it beats and crushes the spirit out of people slowly, day by day. Star Wars has always nodded a little at Nineteen Eighty-Four with its depiction of the Empire, but that influence is much stronger here, with a bit of Brazil-esque surrealism thrown in as well (particularly with Syril Karn's story). The effort it takes for people to "wake up" and realise they have to fight is startling, but once that ball starts rolling it becomes difficult to stop.

Andor does have some flaws. The pacing is deliberate and measured, and for the most part that works well. However, there's at least one episode's worth of material that could have been shaved off to make an even tighter, sharper show. There's also some creaky continuity gaps between Andor and the rest of the franchise: The Bad Batch established that resistance movements against the Empire began almost immediately after its founding (with Andor character Saw Gerrera playing a leading role!), and Rebels, set almost simultaneously with this show, seems to suggest the Rebel Alliance should be much further along the road to being the spaceborne insurgency we all know. Having the Rebellion in a much more nascent form here doesn't seem to be quite right. Others will bemoan a Star Wars show without more action, or one they can't perhaps as easily sit down to watch with their kids.

That said, it's hard to argue with quality. Andor's first season (****½) is an impressive, adult science fiction drama that interrogates many of the ideas and premises of the Star Wars franchise that we haven't seen in live-action before (some of the novels and video games have trodden this kind of ground, though), and restores hope to a franchise that was in danger of becoming moribund.

The season is available to watch now worldwide on Disney+. A second season is in production for airing in 2024.

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