If there’s one Star Wars game that’s stayed with me over the last nearly 20 years more than any other, it’s unquestionably Star Wars Battlefront II. I can remember playing the first game with absolute clarity, from clones dying in waves across the sands of Geonosis to the freezing claustrophobia of the towers of Rhen Var, but when the sequel came out it utterly eclipsed the first game. I played Battlefront II for years, mastering the campaign, conquering the galaxy several times over, and so many wonderful, endless hours spent playing through the entire roster of levels in the Instant Action mode. It didn’t even matter that the ever-rumoured Battlefront III never materialised; II was enough for us all.
Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) (PC, PS4 [reviewed], Xbox One)
Released Nov 2017 | Developed: DICE | Published: EA
Genre: FPS / Third-Person Shooter | HLTB: 7.5 hours
All of this is to say when Battlefront was eventually rebooted, it had some huge shoes to fill, and I don’t think it would be controversial to say it struggled to do so. Not only did the new-gen Battlefront release in the disastrous wake of the sequels, but it also released into a very different game industry and market. Rebuilt as an online multiplayer shooter, Battlefront didn’t just fail to live up to its own legacy, but it only barely managed to carve a niche in a deeply saturated genre. The changes were more than enough to ensure it never had my interest; I’ve always been a single player at heart.
And yet, this pales in comparison to the emergence of 2017’s Battlefront II. Not only did it look set to carry on the path set by the first game as an online shooter – itself unsurprising in the modern day – but it appeared weighed down by all the trappings of a contemporary shooter, including a bevy of microtransactions and additional paid ways to shortcut actually playing the game. A disastrous post by EA’s social media team explaining why it was good, actually, that characters were locked behind extra paywalls regardless of the expense players paid for more so-called complete editions of the game, citing a need to create “a sense of pride and accomplishment” among players, remains infamous as reddit’s most downvoted comment ever. Whatever goodwill and excitement had been counted on thanks to Battlefront’s beloved name was certainly collapsing when this game finally settled onto store shelves in late 2017.
Needless to say, I (to put it bluntly) didn’t give a flying fuck about Battlefront II. Multiplayer games aren’t my thing, online multiplayer especially isn’t my thing, and I had enough disgust at EA’s naked, unashamed, and altogether fucking disgusting capitalist obsession with hoovering up every last cent in the world by means of preying on players that I let Battlefront II pass me by. Occasionally I’d see it on shelves or on the PS4’s storefront and allow myself a wistful sigh before remembering what a travesty it was and sanity would come rolling back to me.
Then something weird happened. I noticed the tide beginning to shift. Obviously Battlefront II was incredibly popular because shooters and Star Wars are both big sells and ultimately 600,000 odd people saying EA sucks on reddit might be big but it’s a drop in the ocean as far as the audience was for a game like this. The backlash was significant though; enough to do something almost unheard of – EA capitulated. Not much, but enough. Aspects of the game were changed and while Battlefront II released to a loud chorus of complaints, after a while things began to soften and before too long people began to seriously praise Battlefront II for delivering a genuinely good experience.
Now I’m a tight-fisted sod so no amount of effusive praise is going to make me fork out 60 quid for a game, and definitely not for one built around online play. But, naturally, time passed and the price dropped and dropped. You’d see Battlefront II show up in sales all the time, down to single digit prices, but even then I was reluctant to buy it. I knew it had a single player campaign, but did I want to pay just under a tenner solely for that? Finally, this Christmas, Battlefront 2 dropped to about 3 quid in a PS sale, so I finally decided that now was the time to give it a whirl.
And you know what? It’s not bad.
The bulk of my time was, of course, spent carousing through the campaign. We play as Iden Versio, an Imperial commando who begins the story by single-handedly (well, almost – she’s assisted by her tiny adorable probe droid, Dio) breaking out of a Rebel cruiser, nicking back a bunch of stolen Imperial codes, and firing herself into space where her team pick her up and return to the Empire. Playing as the baddies in a setting like Star Wars is always a fun, refreshing time, mainly because they’re cartoonishly evil, and our team, Inferno Squad, is no exception – at least at the start. I say that because the notion that we switch sides should in no way constitute a spoiler; I don’t think the publishers would have the stones to have us play purely as members of a genocidal hatecult like the Empire.
Anyway, the game’s intro takes place during the battle of Endor. Inferno Squad are on the ground, running riot through the forests, when – oh no, the Death Star II explodes! (uh, spoilers I guess for Return of the Jedi. Sorry.) I love this space in Star Wars stories – the immediate aftermath of the Emperor’s defeat and the scrambling of Imperial High Command to try and establish some kind of order is, in my opinion, one of the more intriguing places for new Star Wars media to explore. The Empire was galactic in scale after all, and without the Emperor’s mystic powers expanding his cult of personality across it, it’s no wonder that the post-film media has the Empire split into distinct and disparate fiefdoms, each one controlled by an Imperial Warlord nominally attempting to band the strands together but all vying for control. It’s what made Thrawn such a compelling villain in Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire trilogy, back when they were what we had for Star Wars canon, as Zahn’s Sherlockian Admiral forced the Imperial Remnant back together with cold cunning and an incredible, ruthless wisdom.
Of course, the Empire’s plans to reassert dominance in the wake of the Battle of Endor naturally begin to trouble Iden, despite her upbringing consuming Imperial propaganda. When a mission to her homeworld goes awry and reveals the extent of the Empire’s plot, Iden and her comrade Del both rebel, nicking off with their ship and leaving their other comrade behind; said commando, Hask, is the requisite evil teammate who thinks that the Empire is ok. Iden and Del eventually end up helping the burgeoning New Republic and the missions switch from fighting for the Empire to assisting the New Republic’s efforts to build a new galactic government.
If you’ve ever played a game like this before, it’ll come as no great surprise to learn that a large portion of the campaign is mainly just a means of softly tutorialising aspects of the multiplayer, which is obviously where you’re supposed to be funnelled to afterwards. I think at least some of the levels are bespoke, but there’s plenty of stuff that shows up to introduce gameplay elements of the online mode and there’s always that faint sense of being on a guided tour a little. If it’s not tying into the multiplayer, then it’s heavy-handed acknowledgement of less-loved elements of Star Wars, such as the level set on Takodana that feels entirely built around showing off their Maz Kanata model and giving you a chance to play as a hideously bearded Han Solo.
Once you get right down to it, the game is a fairly standard FPS – what could you expect but that from the makers of the Battlefield games? You get to customise Iden’s loadout both before and during missions so you can mix and match weapons and skills to craft a character that plays how you want. Skill cards unlock various abilities that can be used in battle, and obviously you’ll be playing a hell of a lot if you want to unlock them all. Periodically you also get space missions that place you in control of a starfighter, and these control pretty well although most fighters do feel flimsy enough that you’ll die a few times before beating a mission.
Occasionally you also get put in control of a “hero”, which here means an actual named Star Wars character such as Luke, Leia, or Han. Each of them has their own unique loadout and skills so they give you at least a little change of pace. If I had a small nitpick here it’s that playing as a hero forces you into a third-person viewpoint and from this perspective you get to see just how jankily the models move and interact with the world (or rather, how they don’t). Suffice it to say that playing first-person when you can is the way to go here.
Outside of the campaign there is still some stuff you can do as a single player. Battlefront II retains the series’ wonderful Instant Action mode, letting you pick a location and faction and start up a round. The parameters for these fights are fairly customisable, but the traditional way (and my preferred) is having a set number of reinforcements to deplete and is focused on capturing command posts. Once you’ve entered a round you get to pick a class to play as. All factions come loaded with the same core group of classes, such as regular soldiers, heavy gunners, and officers that pack weaker weaponry but get to use abilities to buff their comrades. Each faction also gets unique classes, vehicles and their own heroes as well, but you can’t simply play as these from the get-go; instead you have to earn battle points by completing objectives in the round, which are then exchanged between respawns to let you utilise any of the unique options for your faction.
I was sceptical going into Battlefront II about the implementation of Instant Action as I know it’s multiplayer-focused, but I’m a big believer in this particular game mode being a backbone of single-player play. It was by far the best mode to play in the original Battlefront games, so I was expecting it to be a thrown-together and throwaway mode in this entry so as to again funnel you to play the online multiplayer. I’m pleased to report though that it’s actually still a lot of fun to jump into a big showdown with loads of AI players, running around the maps frantically trying to capture and hold command points.
I have at least one small nitpick with the maps themselves though. If there’s one thing that the original Battlefront games did impeccably, it was creating maps that managed to be both fun and creative to fight in while also recreating enough famous locations from the films so as to give you that rush of fighting for control over the rancor pit in Jabba’s Palace, or the Lars homestead in Tatooine. One of my favourite maps for this was in the second game with its depiction of the Death Star, which let you wage pitched wars down the claustrophobic tunnels of the detention level, through the suspended walkways above the tractor beam controls, and past the firing chambers of the station’s superlaser itself. Imagine how disappointed I was to find that the Death Star map in the newer Battlefront II is just a bunch of nondescript hallways and open-plan rooms littered with chest-high walls.
Regrettably that’s true of all the maps here. They all capture a vague idea of the place but you’re never fighting in the parts of the planet that you want to be. Mos Eisley is just some random lateral streets of its typical squat blocky houses. Yavin IV places you in muddy fields around the ruins, purposefully moving the conflict away from the huge multi-level temple from the films. Jakku has you fighting amidst the sand-covered wreckage of starships, but neither the vast shell of the Star Destroyer that Rey explores nor the town of junkers where she goes to trade her salvage in are anywhere to be seen. All the maps are like this; lovingly rendered slabs of nothing remarkable nor from the source material. Instead we get bland channels and alleys designed to suit the style of conflict DICE consider realistic or marketable, which makes for a perfectly fine game, but it might as well not be Star Wars.
These quibbles aside, is Battlefront II a worthy successor to the franchise? Well, let’s be honest, given I’m not even remotely interested in the multiplayer perhaps my opinion is worth bugger all. However if you, like me, are an avowed preferrer of single-player games, Battlefront II isn’t too awful. It’s by no means superior to either of the PS2-era titles, but I appreciate the effort put into giving us an actual single player-playable game, and I genuinely found myself enjoying the campaign far more than I expected to. It’s not one of the great Star Wars games, and a lot of my grumbles were certainly mitigated by the sub-£5 price tag I paid for it, but Battlefront II was alright.
4/7 – GOOD.
Sure, maybe something doesn’t quite work but at least it has heart, or a spark of excitement that makes it worthwhile despite the faults. Definitely worth a go if you can at least find it on sale.
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