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.