Star Wars: Battlefront, which arrives on store shelves as something of an accessory item to the much-ballyhooed release of the original trilogy on DVD, could be looked on as a sort of gaming “Dream Team”. It takes two highly successful franchises – George Lucas’ omnipresent Star Wars Universe; and EA’s influential Battlefield gaming format – and crossbreeds them into what should be a surefire PC gaming powerhouse. And why not? The game’s profile reads like the marketing department’s dream date: an established and proven set of gaming ideas; a much loved imaginary universe; a company (Lucasarts) with a solid track record; and a release day that takes advantage of the Generation X nostalgia trip that the DVD movies are going to inspire. It’s an almost fool-proof scenario, with gamers on the receiving end.
Like most things built on the back of a previously successful franchise, Star Wars: Battlefront breaks no new ground but instead sticks closely to the established line: You are a soldier in a multiplayer-focused, first-person tactical shooter with player usable vehicles. Battles are won by holding control points, reducing the enemy’s reinforcements, and draining their points to zero. You can cast yourself in one of several class-based roles, all of which are based on character types from the various movies – trooper, heavy weapons specialist, sniper, pilot, etc. The usual balancing system governs how units interact: vehicles can be taken down by heavy weapons guys with rocket launchers, grunts can take out the slow-loading heavy weapons guys, only to in turn be wiped out en masse by heavy vehicles like AT-AT Walkers. Pilots can dispense ammo and health, and can repair damaged vehicles; snipers can pick off enemies at range, and scout enemy movements. A few quirky classes with unique skills manage their way into the game, including Wookie Smugglers, Dark Troopers, and Droidekas. Game play can be either First or Third Person, depending on preference. Battles take place on levels designed around locations from the Star Wars Expanded Universe, and include several memorable locations from the movies themselves.
Four separate factions are available to be played: Rebels and Imperials from the original films; and Republic and Separatists from the new trilogy. Only factions contemporary to each other are able to duke it out on Battlefront’s levels, so at this point gamers won’t be able to set-up a Republic versus Empire fraternal grudge match.
Gamers can play against bots, mix bots and humans, or play just with human players. The game’s AI is respectable – the bots can shoot straight, know a few evasive maneuvers, and their path-finding is trouble-free.
Overall, the results are generally very good, but also surprisingly mixed – while Star Wars: Battlefront is a lot of fun to play, and has some wonderful elements, there are also a few ragged edges that detract from the overall package.
First, the good news: Battlefront has vehicles, and lots of them. Gamers have the chance to use many of the Star Wars classics, including X-Wing fighters, Imperial AT-AT Walkers and Snow Speeders, and it is here that the real fun starts. Battlefront effectively simulates all the familiar vehicle nuances, including authentic sound and particle effects, and when combined with the settings that are derived directly from the major films, the results are wildly entertaining. Being able to hop into a snow-speeder and race over Hoth’s ice fields while using your tow cable to tangle the legs of an Imperial AT-AT Walker is a pop-culture epiphany for Gen-X’rs like me. So is the sublime joy of zipping through Endor’s primeval forests on the back of an Imperial speeder bike. Other thrills abound, whether it’s wiping out whole platoons of enemy soldiers with your Scout Walker, or climbing into an X-Wing and shooting a TIE fighter from the sky over Cloud City. Add in generous doses of John Williams’ epic Star Wars musical score, and you have the prefect recipe for geek nirvana.
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The various player-classes are reasonable facsimiles of the classes found in other tactical shooters, but they are effectively balanced, and fun to play. Small class variations exist between different factions, but the differences are minimal – an Imperial Scout is much the same as a Republic Clone Sharpshooter, which is virtually identical to a Separatist Assassin Droid, which hardly varies from a Rebel Marksman.
However, a few original ideas do creep in to spice things up. All the snipers, for instance, have the usual scoped weapons, thermal detonators, and other sundry. But they also have one addition that presents very interesting possibilities – the recon droid. When activated, this remote controlled droid can be sent flying out into the battlefield to scope out enemy positions and movements. It essentially becomes the extended eyes for the scout. The recon droid also come with the ability to call down orbital strikes on the area in which it is currently occupying. Doing so wipes out the droid, but enemy units in the line of fire will take damage.
It is a potentially great tool. However, the implementation is lacking, since the droids are fragile enough that a single blaster shot (or even an accidental bump into a wall) can destroy them, and the orbital strikes themselves don’t have the punch to do serious damage. Had the orbital strikes packed a bit more thump, the effect would have been interesting, but as things stand now, the effort required to infiltrate a recon droid into an area heavily infested with enemy elements simply isn’t worth the pay-off.
Of the unique classes in the game, the most interesting is the Separatist Droidekas, which were seen in The Phantom Menace. These are essentially mobile turrets with their own shield generators. They are nicely balanced pieces of hardware, heavily out-gunning any other player class on the battlefield, but slow to move when deployed, and unable to enter other vehicles. The Droidekas can get around quite quickly by disengaging their weapons and rolling about like demented bowling balls, but are vulnerable when doing so, and take a moment to setup and activate their shields and weapons once they reach their destination. Altogether, it makes for a very effective and fun-to-play character, lethal when used properly and yet still nicely vulnerable.
The maps run the gamut from the tried-and-true movie locations, to the Expanded Universe settings, and the tactical requirements vary only moderately from map to map. Hoth, Endor, Tatooine, and Naboo are all here, augmented by such places as Chewbacca’s Kashyyyk home world. For many of these maps, vehicles are the key – either you have them, or you have a problem. A few maps are focused on infantry close combat, and some offer a well-balanced mix of both these elements.
When these elements click, they make Battlefront a very compelling gaming experience. However, there are weaknesses that occasionally interrupt the Gen-X rapture. The maps, for instance, are strictly hit and miss, with some moments of genuine inspiration, but also a whole lot of uninteresting and unchallenging design ideas. Some of the maps have layouts so simple and basic they fail to present opportunities for tactical play, and this in turn reduces the game to little more than a glorified death match. This can be fun in small doses, but the key to successful game play is tactical coordination using all the roles in their assigned place, and the maps that do not bring these elements into effective play quickly become boring.
Both the “Naboo: Plains” and “Tatooine: Dune Sea” maps suffer from this over-simplicity. Rather than take advantage of some of the established geographical features from these worlds (Tatooine’s twisting canyons and ravines, or Naboo’s forest and swamp areas) all we are given are some wide-open and nearly featureless battlegrounds, studded with a few boulders for effect, but basically bereft of any significant tactical elements. They are also rather small, especially if you are interested in taking to the skies in an X-Wing or TIE fighter – ranging beyond the maps’ player boundary is too easy, and severely limits these vehicles’ usability.
The better maps show the well-crafted balance and design behind the game’s tactical dynamics. “Rhen Var: Harbor” – a location not from the movies but from the Star Wars Expanded Universe of the books and comics – is a solid example, thanks to its well-conceived layout, which gives the defenders some key choke points to defend, but also gives the attacking forces some great access routes to exploit. Wide open spaces allow vehicles to engage in thunderous fire-fights, while tighter passages give the foot soldiers a place to get up close and personal. The resulting battles are noisy and lethal, with momentum see-sawing unpredictably between the factions.
Ultimately, Star Wars: Battlefront is designed for the online community, and while internet play was fun, it was also occasionally problematic. On a high-speed DSL connection, I rarely played a game without experiencing network problems, and lag and latency were perpetual difficulties that effected game play. Also, the server browser is a bit on the twitchy side. However, Battlefront is certainly not the first game to experience this sort of initial net code difficulty, and an early patch has already been released to deal with the most pressing of these issues. The jury is still out in regards to the patch’s effectiveness. More improvements are no doubt in the works, and hopefully these problems will be resolved in the near future.
Battlefront does come with a single-player module. It is more than a bot-filled dry run through the various maps – although not by much. The same maps from the multiplayer have been assembled into campaigns, including Galactic Civil War, and the Clone Wars. There are some differences from the multiplayer module, including a few interesting scenarios right out of the movies. A vague ghost of a story gives the proceedings a sense of cohesion, coupled with cut scenes lifted right from the movies themselves. The campaigns are fun to play, and help newbies learn the Star Wars ropes, but they certainly don’t take the place of online play. It is against other live players, on well-balanced maps, that Star Wars: Battlefront really shines.
Technically, Star Wars: Battlefront shows the same mix of great and problematic elements as the gameplay. The game’s look is slick and polished, and it was reasonably stable on my system. I played on an AthlonXP 2500+, with 512mb DDR RAM, and a Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb video card, and frame-rates were excellent at 1024/768 with all settings to maximum and anti-aliasing at 4x. The graphics are not ground-breaking by any means, but they are clean and attractive, and make good used of DirectX 9 hardware. Modeling and animations are first rate – the lurching AT-AT’s and other grotesque Star Wars hardware look and move like their cinematic counterparts, and the characters move realistically.
However, the game had some installation problems with the second of the three game discs – it would hang partway through the installation procedure, forcing a reboot of my PC. I solved the problem by copying the 2nd discs files to the hard drive, and installing them from there. A browse through the various gaming forums relating to Battlefront revealed that others have had similar problems.
Also, the manual and online instructions are abysmal. They cover the very basics, but nothing more, and some fairly key elements aren’t covered at all – how to use recon droids, how to activate the jetpacks (hit spacebar 2x), and how to switch secondary weapons (“G”), all receive little mention in the manual, and not all of them can even be found in the control configuration menus. These baffling omissions make learning the game trickier than it ought to be. You either learn the key-mapping through experimental fiddling with your keyboard, or you go online and to hunt down the information from someone who has already done so.
Star Wars: Battlefront is a very good game that has the potential to be a truly great game. If Lucasarts can tame its networking quirks, deepen the map selection, and iron out a few of its weapons and class wrinkles, Battlefront stands the chance of being the most addictive online game since Counterstrike. As it stands now, Battlefront is a blast for Star Wars aficionados and a solid experience for regular gamers, but it should be considered something of a work in progress, and future patches can do much to alleviate its short comings.
