REVIEW

Star Wars Battlefront Review

by Ian Stokes, December 12th, 2015

Star Wars Battlefront is back. After a long hiatus, EA and DICE have rebooted the series with this latest entry, which is obviously too cool to have a number at the end of its name and therefore will be called Star Wars Battlefront. It’s not to be confused with Star Wars: Battlefront. Will it bring balance to the force or leave it in darkness?

First impressions are good, as Star Wars Battlefront is an almost perfect recreation of the look, sound and feel of the original Star Wars movies. Graphically the game pushes the consoles a little too hard, especially my poor Xbox One which can only manage 720p resolution compared to the PS4’s slightly more acceptable 900p, but even at potato quality resolution Battlefront looks outstanding. Really though, Battlefront achieves the Star Wars feel not just through raw graphical power, but rather through the level of detail and polish that DICE have put into putting the player into the films. The sound design is utter perfection, with everything from the pew pew of the blasters to the roaring sound of a Tie Fighter passing overhead all accompanied by recreations of John William’s original trilogy soundtrack. The first time I jumped into a speeder bike on Endor and heard that indescribable and yet unmistakable engine sound I felt a little shiver down my spine. Even looking past the basics of graphical clout and sound design, DICE have shown their commitment to recreating the franchise with love and attention. The death animations for Stormtroopers and rebels are fantastic, with camp flailing ala the movies being the order of the day.

The core gunplay of this Battlefront reboot is very reminiscent of the older titles in the series, with a simple arcade-like feel to it. You can play from either a first or third-person viewpoint, with both options having their advantages; it’s a little easier to aim and shoot in first-person, but third-person gives you a much greater situational awareness. I played in third-person predominantly because the first-person mode in older Battlefronts sucked, so Battlefront has always been a third-person shooter to me. There isn’t much in the way of skill in the shooting; you point the blaster at the bad guy and whoever started shooting first wins. Unless they have a better gun than you.

You’d think a game with 11 guns in it could maintain a semblance of balance between those weapons but sadly this isn’t the case. Don’t get me wrong, every gun will drop somebody in short order so you’ll never have a ‘bad’ gun, but some of the weapons are just ridiculous. The last weapon you unlock, the DL-44 is basically a fast-firing, two-shot pistol with a crazy range. On all but the largest maps, this is the only weapon you will see high level players using. At range there is a little more variety with single shot DMR-type blasters, heavy machine guns and regular assault rifles all being viable.

In addition to your base weapon, you can also choose your soldiers starting loadout by creating a card hand. You can have two equipment style cards mapped to the bumpers and then one ability mapped to Y. The equipment cards are things like grenades, rocket launchers and jet packs whilst the ability cards offer temporary boosts like eliminating weapon overheating for a few seconds, or a personal shield which blocks weapons fire to give you a chance to escape. The equipment cards are fairly well balanced, with each piece serving a specific role. You can use the jetpack to reach a higher vantage point, whilst the Ion Torpedo will allow you to put the hurt on vehicles. Most of the abilities seem pretty lacklustre, offering a minor buff to your abilities for a few seconds; the exception to this being the scan pulse which shows you and your allies all enemies within a significant radius even if they are behind cover/walls/hills etc. Wall hacks are almost never a good idea in games and it continues to be a bad, overpowered idea here. Thankfully you can only use your central ability if you have a charge, which you pick up from the battlefield. Strangely these charges carry over between games meaning that unless you spend a few games concentrating on stocking up every now and then, you won’t have more than a couple of charges per match which at least brings the power of these abilities into check.

Whilst these abilities are fine for the most part, the unlock system by which you earn them feels very arbitrary and unfair, with all the best gear reserved for higher level players. Battlefront traditionally had a class system and it would have served this reboot well to stick with this, rather than tacking on a card unlock system which ultimately homogenises the player base with everyone using the jetpack and then one other weapon card depending on preference.

In addition to the loadout options, you can also personalise the look of your rebel/empire soldier through numerous preset appearances and emotes. There are some pretty nifty looking alien races that you can use as your rebel solider, but sadly they are all locked until you hit at least level 40. The presence of helmetless Stormtroopers is sure to annoy many Star Wars purists, but beyond the ‘it’s not canon’ moaning it does actually mess with how easily identifiable each team’s soldiers are when at a distance the best way to determine if that is a friendly rebel or evil Stormtrooper running at you is to look for the iconic helmet. It would have been better if the Stormtroopers kept their helmets on but had armour customisation instead.

At launch Battlefront had 12 maps, though two more have since been added with the free Battle of Jakku update. Even with this bolstering of the numbers, Battlefront feels understaffed in this department, especially when you consider that the large-scale battles of Walker Assault and Supremacy only have five maps to cycle through which gets repetitive pretty quickly. A greater focus on these larger maps and the Supremacy game mode, whilst maybe cutting back on smaller maps would have alleviated this. They wouldn’t have needed to cut back on small maps either, since sections of these large maps could still have been cordoned off for use in the smaller match-ups. With that said, the maps are stunningly beautiful recreations of the Star Wars battlefields we know and love, from Echo Base on Hoth to the Forest Moon of Endor which may be one of the most beautiful environments I have ever seen in a video game. Every piece of vegetation in the map reacts to your presence and your actions, with small trees getting blasted apart by AT-ST fire, whilst ferns rustle as you sneak through them. The word gets overused a lot, but it really is very immersive.

Battlefront does its best to hide its lack of content with a plethora of game modes. Smaller modes like Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, King of the Hill etc. are all here and accounted for though they have been renamed to feel more Star Wars so Team Deathmatch is now Blast, King of the Hill is now Drop Zone and so on. These modes are distractions at best, with Walker Assault and Supremacy forming the real meat of the gameplay. Walker Assault pits the Rebellion against the Empire in an asymmetric battle where the Rebels must activate as many uplinks as possible whilst the empire must stop them. Each uplink adds a Y-wing bomber to the next bombing run and the more bombers the rebels bring in, the longer the AT-AT’s shields stay down so the rebels to shoot the living crap out of them. After three bombing runs, the Empire wins if at least one of the AT-ATs is still standing. During the beta this mode was hilariously one-sided in favour of the Empire, however I’m happy to report that now slightly one-sided in favour of the rebels…at least from my own experience. I guess slightly one-sided in one direction is better than stupidly one-sided in the other. Supremacy has both sides looking to take control points and push the other side back further into their side of the map. Teams can win by pushing them all the way back or by controlling the majority of the map at the game’s end. These two game modes are the only ones available that offer the sense of scale we’ve come to expect from Battlefront.

The surprise standout game types from the rest of the bunch are Fighter Squadron and Heroes vs Villains. Fighter Squadron features ten human-controlled players on each side flying X-wings, Tie Fighters and the like in a massive aerial battle along with plenty of AI controlled ships. The AI are just there to give the battle a sense of scale and they do an admirable job as you dodge, duck, dip dive and dodge between enemy ships blasting them out of the sky. The hero ships, Slave I and the Millennium Falcon are overpowered as hell and you can only really hope to take one of them down if you’re controlling the other, but nonetheless it is great fun. Heroes vs Villains is a six vs six mode with three heroes/villains and three regular troopers on each team; the regular troops respawn, the special characters do not and a team loses once all their big names go down. There is something immensely satisfying about frying Luke Skywalker as the Emperor or blasting Darth Vader as Han Solo.

Battlefront’s biggest crime in my eyes isn’t its lack of content however, but rather it’s coddling of the playerbase to such an extent that there is no game chat. In order to make the game as accessible as possible, game chat has been omitted presumably so that parents can leave their kids playing it without having to worry about someone offering to sell their kids Death Star plans. The downside to this is that there is no way to make friends within the game, so if like me your entire friends list is playing Halo 5 and/or Fallout 4 then you’re kind of up Beggar’s canyon without your T-16. I’ve never played a multiplayer shooter that feels this isolated before, it is a bizarre experience. Furthermore, the lack of communication options means that teams have little to no co-ordination in their actions, which is especially damning when you consider that Battlefront’s premier game types are objective-based and require teamwork.

Ultimately, Star Wars Battlefront is fine. That’s all I can say about it. DICE have put so much work into Battlefront to make it as inoffensive as possible, but in casting such a wide net they have created a game that lacks depth in some key areas. I’m not asking for Battlefield Star Wars here, but the inability to communicate with my teammates along with the low map count and tacked on unlock system just left me feeling ultimately disappointed in Battlefront. It’s not bad, but if you took the Star Wars skin off it, you’d be looking at a serious contender for blandest shooter of all time. Also where the hell is my Galactic Conquest mode?