The single player spin-off from Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) has been given a release year, but it doesn’t look very promising yet…

At CitizenCon 2024, CIG presented an hour-long gameplay demo of Squadron 42, a single-player title set in the world of Star Citizen. The demo was not perfect. Crashes, framerate tanking in some places… no wonder it will be a while before CIG releases it, and as we wrote over the weekend, this confirms what Ton Henderson wrote on Insider Gaming: they have only just reached the stage where the game is feature ready, despite what CIG claimed… or rather lied about a year ago.

CIG frontman Chris Roberts said that Squadron 42, scheduled for release in 2026, will take about 30-40 hours to play through. It will feature the starting pilot of the UEE (United Empire of Earth) assigned to Squadron 42. The story starts in 2945, when the Vanduul attack the Vega II. Several big stars will appear in the game.

Gary Oldman (Admiral Ernst Bishop), Mark Hamill (Lieutenant Commander Steve “Old Man” Colton), Mark Strong (Captain Thomas Wade), Sophie Wu (Po Cara “Web” Webster), John Rhys-Davies (Randall Graves), Liam Cunningham (Captain Noah White), Jack Huston (Cal Mason), Ben Mendelsohn (Julian Wexler), Rhona Mitra (Executive Officer Kelly), Henry Cavill (Ryan Enright), Gillian Anderson (Captain MacLaren), Sandi Roberts (Nayara “Pusher” Fell), Andy Serkis (Thul’Oquray), Ian Duncan (The Player), Stephen Bisland (Eugene Morrow), Arkie Reece (Sigfried Behr), Daniel Ings (Graham Yury), Craig Fairbrass (Vat Tagaca), Polly Eachus (Evelyn Ishitaka), Art Campion (Brian “Weezy” Weiters), Gemma Whelan (Becca Farneway), Avin Shah (Sergeant Grey), Jason Wong (Michael Shaw), Cristina Dohmen (newscaster) and Eleanor Tomlinson (Saic Rebecca Trejo) were also mentioned.

So Squadron 42 will be released sometime in 2026. And rumor has it that CIG will use it to fund Star Citizen. Oh dear…

Source: WCCFTech