I got Star Wars: Battlefront the other day, and I have to admit it’s not as good as I originally hoped.

It’s basically a clone of the Battlefield games like Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield Vietnam. While those games have fast-paced furious action, Battlefront tends to be alot slower and clunkier. Part of this can be attributed to the fact that Battlefront was evidently developed for the X-Box first, and ported to the PC (and presumably PS2) later. The controls just scream Halo to me, and I don’t particularly enjoy it. Controls are sluggish, weapon control is cumbersome, and switching seats in vehicles is frustrating to no end.

The game attempts to recreate all the major battle scenes from all 5 movies (with a few not in the movies, presumably from Episode III). At the start you choose to join the Rebel or Imperial army (In GCW Time), or the Clone Troopers or Droid Army (in Clone Wars Time). Then you choose your spawn point and which of 4 or 5 classes to be. It’s all downhill from there. You can’t change your weapon loadout after you spawn, so you’re stuck with whatever you start with until you die. Add to this some of the “super vehicles” like the ATAT and it can create some really frustrating scenes. Then add in the incredible stupidity of the bots and it’s even worse. I’ve died at the hands of my fellow squadmates more than the enemy. It’s simply embarassing.

Where this game truly shines is in Multiplayer. I’ve played a bit online, and I have to admit most of the defects are redeemed in the fun ! The classes are hideously imbalanced, leading to some rather boring looking battles (all Super Battle Droids vs Dark Jetpack Troopers, etc).

I’ll probably play it a bit more, but not for long. I’ve already (after only 4 hours of play time) beaten both the Clone Wars & Galactic Civil War campaigns, along with a few of the Galactic Conquest missions. Multiplayer is fun, but finding a good server is hard and the user interface for selecting servers is abhorrant.

All in all, I give this one the following:

  • Sound: 9/10 (Works flawlessly with my SBLive 4.1 setup, and sounds great)
  • Graphics: 8/10 (Environmental graphics are awesome, but character models are a little too sparse).
  • Controls: 4/10 (I would have much preffered standard FPS controls, eg Numbers for Weapons instead of a Toggle button)
  • User Interface: 6/10 (It’s pretty, but slow & pointless. Also full of bugs, like not being able to remap the mouse buttons & the horrible server selection screen)
  • Overall: 7/10 (Entertaining & somewhat fun, but the bugs really squash alot of the entertainment value).

Hopefully a patch will be released soon to address some of these issues.

Be Sociable, Share!