How to Drift in Star Wars Squadrons

Drifting is a vital maneuver to master in Star Wars Squadrons. When you’re going at full speed or faster, the turn radius of your ship is wide. To perform tight turns and maintain your speed, you’ll want to perform a drift. Here’s how to drift in Star Wars Squadrons, and how to perform the more advanced and useful micro drift maneuver.

How to Drift in Star Wars Squadrons

To drift in Star Wars Squadrons, you will first need to divert power to your thrusters or engines. When you have sufficient boost, begin to boost and hit the drift button. Doing this allows you to look in any direction freely. You will keep your momentum while you look around. Drifting like this is useful, but it leaves you vulnerable while you’re coasting in a straight line before coming to a complete stop. That’s where the “micro drift” comes into play.

How to Micro Drift

To micro drift, tap the boost key again when facing the new direction you want to move in. Doing this cancels out the original boost and performs a new one in the proper direction, propelling you to full speed instantaneously. You can continue doing micro drifts repeatedly until you run out of boost. While playing as Empire, you can refill your boost gauge immediately by pushing emergency power to the engines.

Mastering the micro drift technique makes you a hard target to follow, and is far superior to merely drifting in a straight line. If you’re still having trouble with a basic drift, there’s a mission in the single-player campaign that teaches you how to do it. Play through that tutorial and practice the maneuver on your own in a practice game. It will come in handy if an enemy tries to lose you, or if you need to evade incoming missiles.