Star Wars: Battlefront

The Good
What you’re looking at is gorgeous presentation with some of John Williams’ great music scores and epic foley sound effects. The live-action cutscenes set the stage as much as the mission briefing. Every planet and battle front you go to has plenty of space, multiple routes for you to fix and flank your enemies. Many notable battles from Naboo to Hoth seem to show you what you didn’t see in the Star Wars movies.

What you can do during the battle depends a great deal on available resources, choices you make and creative moves that you execute. There are turrets for defense, kill zones to pin your foes, vehicles to spearhead enemy territory and specific troop classes you can pick to fight the battle differently. You get a decent variety and play style whether you’re an OOM battle droid, Republic Clone or Empire Stormtrooper. There’s enough content in the game to make playability last.

The Bad
You might think that, with practice and tryouts, you would be ready for this game. But when you go deep into the gameplay, there are many problems you need to withstand to play it through and through. One problem is the lack of balance between the types of soldiers. You only get two weapons, nothing else. Your abilities as a rocket trooper or sniper have very limited ammo, you need an ammo droid at all times. And the healing droids have a slow rate of healing. And speaking of slow, you’re going to find your soldier spawning at the most inconvenient spots that force you to do a marathon of jogging, wasting precious seconds to enter the battle. If you'd spawn at a command post nearer the frontline or of your choosing, that would have worked.

The controls are another matter. Mouse can be jerky and make aiming precisely a chore. Controls are not predefined well since your finger on the mouse can accidentally slide on the right mouse button and throw a grenade you didn’t mean to toss because we all take traditional modern shooter controls for granted. But the worst part of the game are the flying vehicles which seem to soar out of control and crash using the reverse mouse aim. Why couldn’t there be manual ascend, descend and accelerate buttons for user friendly movement? You’d best stick to boots on the ground.

The Bottom Line
Battlefront did some things right like capturing the Star Wars lore and atmosphere perfectly and paved the way for a fantastic battle simulation framework. Unfortunately what problems exist make it less fun to play, where you expect to fight harder. Still there is decent genuine challenge. Perhaps specialists like Kyle Katarn or RC-1138 would have fared better, but that’s wishful thinking. As long as you stick to choosing a regular rifle trooper and nothing else, you should last throughout the battle without too many losses. It’s gun toting time across the galaxy when you grab yourself a copy and get it running.

The Good
The thing that truly makes Star Wars Battlefront entertaining is that you can do whatever you want, anywhere you want.(Maybe except a strip club with Jabba staring at his alien dancers) Also Whenever you want, choose either The Galactic Civil War Era or The Clone Wars Era, which changes games experience. Also another interesting fact is you can play on four organizations, the Droid Army, the Clones, The Empire or the Rebels. Oh, did I forget vehicles? nope. Thy'ere is a vast variety of vehicles from swift Speeder Bikes to immense AT-AT Walkers.The music is superb and changes from the classic trilogy music to Episode I and II, depending on which era you choose. And don't worry their are plenty of weapons!!! But most of all, they have footage from the star wars films which are used in Historical campaign hand Galactic Conquest, awesome. Also their are Planets that in which you can choose your battles like Hoth, Naboo and more.

The Bad
Sometimes games have a dark side, but they all do. one downfall is it gets repetitive at times, like you can't make it past a Droideka unless you kill get killed ten times. (Yes you can be a Destroyer Droid.) Second of all the extras are not too surprising, just stills and concept art, you deserve much more, like cheats for all your hard work! Last of all, the Historical Campaigns are too short, yet the game is not lacking.

The Bottom Line
The game is a brilliant game, mostly set on the star wars battles and characters, and is very war like and you can play for hours without boring out, and is one of the best Star Wars games, I have ever known so get your wallet out and buy it, it's worth it.

The Good
The graphics are very well done and it features video clips direct from the movies which are nice to see. It's also interesting fighting in all the different locations taken from the movies. And the areas are recreated very well.

It's nice to play as the light and dark sided teams and you have the ability to play in both 1st and 3rd person, which can be nice for fighting.

The number of different units you can play as is great. You won't get bored with playing the same unit all the time.

The rankings at the end of each mission are interesting as they track things such as top "camper" (staying in one place for long periods of time), top deadeye (headshots), and top enemy of the state (kills). You can also see the stats of all bots in the game.

The Bad
Where do I begin? First of all, the most disappointing thing about this game is the format of it for single players. This game is really a multiplayer-only game. If you choose to play single player, you are simply playing a standard multiplayer bot match against the computer rather than against other people. If you die, you just spawn back into the game.

Weapons are limited greatly based on what unit you play. You have a main weapon with very limited ammunition, a secondary weapon with unlimited ammunition (but it recharges slowly), and some form of mine/bomb weapon. You may also have a shield, health packs, etc. If you end up running out of ammo for your main weapon, unless you want the limited weapon power of the blaster weapon that has unlimited ammo, you basically have to just go get yourself killed so you can respawn with more ammo.

AI is sadly lacking in the game. If you go up onto a ledge/balcony/etc and sit there, you can take pot-shots at your enemies as they come along and no one will try to get you. There is no thought of flanking or retreating or anything. Units will often just stand there as you shoot them.

The Bottom Line
If you like Star Wars, you like Bot matches, and you can live with poor AI, this game is definitely for you. The graphics are great and the short clips from the movies are nice to watch.

On the other hand, if you want good AI and a real single player game... find something better.