Starfighter Assault pits two teams, each with 12 player-controlled ships, in various dogfighting scenarios. It's an evolution of the simple "Fighter Squadron" mode found in the last Battlefront and the three-phase "Battle Station" experience introduced in its Death Star expansion. At Gamescom, I was able to play a mission that takes place above Fondor, around a strategic Imperial shipyard. As the Rebel Alliance, it was my job to obliterate the base. The mission was broken down into three phases; unlike Battle Station, these all took place in the air, however. They involved whittling down the Imperial defences, destroying some crucial shield projectors and finally, damaging the couplings that protect the ship's vulnerable reactor.

There's no time limit, but you have a limited number of rebel ships at your disposal. Once your starighter has been destroyed, you'll need to claim a new one from this collective pool, which serves almost as a health bar for the resistance. If you play as the Empire, it's your job to keep the Rebels at bay and clear this stockpile of ships before they're able to complete the mission. The two objectives are connected but distinct from one another, pushing players to team up and focus their fire in different ways.

Jeff Seamster, audio and narrative director at Criterion, said each mission is designed to reflect the two sides and their position in the larger conflict. In the case of Fondor, set in the original Star Wars trilogy, it's a confident Empire against a Rebel Alliance on the verge of extinction. "The Empire, pretty much at the beginning of every day, thinks 'There's no way we could possibly lose,' and the Rebels know at the beginning of every day there's a very slim chance they're actually going to win," he explained.

Those odds have to be reflected in the objectives. Underneath, the odds are even, but on a surface level it should feel like the Rebels are at a severe disadvantage.

"It's all down to routine play-testing," he said. "We know right away if it's like, 'You know what, it's just a little too easy for the Rebels to break through,' or, 'The Empire is having way too easy a time sitting back on their haunches.' So we play it and talk about it constantly while we're not playing it, and how it felt to come away from it. We have these debriefs afterwards where we ask, 'Did that feel too easy? Did that feel appropriately difficult?'"

That balance feeds into the ships and their different roles. At first, for instance, I enjoyed piloting the A-Wing, which comes under the Interceptor class. It's a small, agile fighter that can weave elegantly through the complex architecture found inside the Galactic base. I used this ship to defend some Y-Wing bombers, but soon realised that an X-Wing would be better positioned to both protect and support these heavy gunners. As soon as the second objective started — taking out the shield nodes in a trench run-inspired corridor — I switched to the hardier Y-Wing and lead the attack, relying on the rest of my squadron to cover me.