Star Wars Battlefront Review

Okay, okay, I admit it. I'm a Star Wars nerd.

More than just a Fan, I'm a full-on, pocket protector wearing, quoting the ENTIRE TRILOGY while attending conventions with a plastic lightsaber at my hip, NERD.

My God, you ARE big. But I'll shoot at you anyway, see if it works.

Time for eating some dirt... yet again. Man, do I hate my job.

Aside from that, I am a very critical videogame reviewer. When you combine the two, it can make for a very volatile mix, especially given the sordid past of Star Wars games.

LucasArts has had a very hit-or-miss history with its Star Wars franchise, with blockbusters such as X-Wing, Tie Fighter, the Jedi Knight series, and Knights of the Old Republic, as well as some real bottom of the barrel games like SW: Force Commander, SW: Episode 1 - Battle for Naboo, and SW: Galactic Battlegrounds. So it makes sense that when a new Star Wars game comes out, it invariably is met with loads of anticipation by the unwashed masses who want to capture the true feel of the Star Wars Universe in a video game. However, it is all too common that those unwashed masses are met with inferior efforts that result in disappointing games.

One of the things that LucasArts has been doing to "keep up with the Jones's" so to speak, is to take existing franchises that do very well commercially and put a Star Wars flair to them - specifically the copying of Ensemble's popular Age Of Empires series and turning it into Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds and taking DICE's fabulous Battlefield: 1942 and, with the help of Pandemic Studios, morphing it into the recently released Star Wars Battlefront.

The idea behind the game is simple - take the massive scope of the Star Wars universe, and make a game where recreating the huge battles of the two trilogies is possible, where the player can fill almost any role - from the lowly nameless Stormtrooper to the hotshot X-Wing pilot, to the massive AT-AT walkers, to the Wookie Smuggler juggernauts to the mass-produced Battle Droids and Clone Troopers, and pit them in mighty struggles against one another, Battlefield-style. Each side is given an equal number of points, which can be used to spawn various types of troops, with each side having an equal selection of archetypes to select from. Everyone gets the 4 basic food groups - assault (armed with a blaster rifle, pistol and grenades), demolitions (with a rocket launcher, pistol and grenades), sniper (with a sniper rifle, pistol and grenades....notice a pattern?), pilot/engineer (with a repair tool, blaster shotgun or grenade launcher, pistol and grenades), and one special class that is unique to each side, but is essentially a super-assault type. The Droids get the mighty Droideka, the rolling droids complete with 4 blaster cannons and a temporary shield. The Clone Troopers possess the Jump Trooper, with a jetpack and blaster-shotgun, which is also mirrored in the Empire's Dark Trooper, with the same loadout.

The game plays exactly like any other Battlefield game, so if you're expecting new and innovative gameplay, you can look somewhere else. The main selling point to this game is the fact that now you can look like a Rebel soldier, Imperial Stormtrooper, or whatever your heart desires. The single player recounts various campaigns in the Star Wars universe, from the Droid and Clone Wars, to the Rebellion and beyond, and an addition called Galactic Conquest, where you can essentially rewrite the movies by attacking and conquering the various planets one at a time. Each planet you control gives your army a specific upgrade such as additional accuracy, more points to use, Bacta tanks that constantly heal your players, or a Jedi to fight alongside your warriors. The skins and models are pretty accurate, given the fact they need to be streamlined for online play, and the maps are adequate, at best. They did take some extra care to recreate scenes from some of the movies, with the Battle of the Clones from Episode II and the Empire's assault on Echo Base on Hoth taking the cake with the full recreation of what the field would look like in game. There aren't the millions of clones and Battle Droids taking the field, but the action does get pretty hairy. The team at Pandemic did a good job on those maps, but some of the others like the Bespin and Tatooine fields were rather plain and a bit lacking. (Although the Gungan slaughter on Naboo was fun....) Additions of starfighters like the TIE Fighter, X-Wing and Snowspeeders seemed a bit blah, especially after being rendered in such fabulous games like...well....TIE Fighter and X-Wing.

Welcome to the home of Yeti, the Snowman. The Snowman has moved to his friend Santa's home in Florida. Sorry for the inconvenience.

So I took a little walk in the graveyard, and there are these blokes, shootin' some nasty lookin' green bolts at me. And then of course, I go all crazy...

No matter which campaign you play, single player or multi, the gameplay is essentially the same, with the AI putting more units on the field to give each mission that feeling that you're engrossed in a war of galactic proportions, no matter which map you're on. This feeling would be made complete if the AI in the game wasn't as dumb as a stone. The bots provided with the game are as dumb as posts, wading sluggishly into battle to be cut down in 3 seconds by random blaster fire, and oftentimes the seemingly invincible Jedi that joins your team will be stuck in a corner, swinging his mighty lightsaber at a pillar or a wall, or anything that flat out isn't your enemies. What's worse is that you can't choose a Jedi as a playable character, so it's not like someone can jump into the shoes of Darth Vader, Mace Windu or the like and whip up on some cannon fodder, to help turn the tide of battle to your favor. Secondarily, while the models of all of the various sides are different, the weapons are essentially the same, just with different skins. The shot patterns are alike, the zoom features are the same, and the damage is the same, which sets no side really ahead of any other. I can understand the need to balance the sides against one another, but giving each side the exact same weapons seems like a real cop-out. There really is no difference between any of the sides, as far as infantry is concerned. Perhaps making the Rebels' blasters fire faster, and do less damage, or increasing the punch of the Clone Troopers would make for more interesting match-ups, but there's none of that here. The vehicles are an eclectic mix, but some tanks like the AT-ST Scout Walker are just too unwieldy to maneuver in the tighter maps.

The sounds in the game are ripped straight from the movies, so they're fantastic, with the impressive score from John Williams permeating the background. There isn't much I have to say that's negative sound-wise, so I'll just leave that be. Some of the positional audio effects could use a touching up, but that's the worst thing that I have to say about that, so I'll leave it be.

When all is said and done, this is a decent game that captures the epic feel of the massive Star Wars universe in one box, but the delivery certainly leaves a lot to be improved upon. I wanted to love this game (what Star Wars fanatic wouldn't?), but the fact is that this game is good but not great. The game needed about another 3 to 6 months of development time to get some of the bugs worked out (specifically the AI and the weapons loadouts), but I have a feeling the pressure was on since they timed the game's release with the release of the original trilogy's DVD iteration. I guess we'll have to wait for at least one to two patches for this game to truly be done, which is monumentally disappointing.

The Force is not as strong with this one, my Master.