Star Wars: Battlefront is the kind of game that turns heads – not just because of a certain degree of hype and marketing power behind it, but because of the promises it offers. Who wouldn’t love to fight on the Battle of Hoth, Snowspeeders, AT-ATs and all, or wage war through the streets of Naboo, re-enacting all your favorite scenes from Star Wars from first or third person, diving through the trenches or zipping through the air? Of course, Battlefield 1942 has already beaten everyone to the punch in terms of large-scale vehicular/infantry multiplayer warfare, but dammit, this is the Star Wars universe! How could a game that lets you pilot an AT-AT possibly be wrong? Truth to be told, it can’t – unless you slap in some shoddy netcode, sprinkle on a few interface problems, and add in a side-helping of odd gameplay quirks for good measure. Still, Star Wars: Battlefront is a decent game that I’m happy to add to my gaming collection, if only because the sheer feeling of an authentic Star Wars simulation has been unmatched by most other games until now. But a number of improvements need to be made to buff up the experience, all of which I’ll describe in this article, of course.

Star Wars: Battlefront is an online title much in the vein of the aforementioned Battlefield 1942, in that the gameplay revolves around trying to seize specific spawn points on a given map and preventing the enemy from doing the same, while at the same time killing enemy soldiers to reduce their team’s “ticket” count – the first team to drop to zero, loses. Also like Battlefield 1942, the game features several different character classes for each team, allowing for a variety of different playstyles and tactics. There are also numerous vehicles available on most missions, many of which can accommodate more than one person. Beyond those similarities, however, the game is all Star Wars, and every step seems to have been taken to put players right into their favorite scenes of battle. After overcoming the mighty three-disc install and masterfully scrounging around to find out where the CD key was (right on the jewel case, for a novel change), I opened up into the game launcher, grimaced at the much-too-loud high-pitched sound effects accompanying the click of each menu option (I’m positive my hearing was damaged somewhat after that initial experience – couldn’t they have been toned down just a little?), made sure the game was up to date, and dutifully launched, hot with anticipation of my new impending enlistment as a daring Rebel pilot.

After some basic fiddling with the control configuration settings, I went into the game’s online multiplayer dialogue, and was promptly blown back at how utterly terrible the server browser was. Not only was my precious filter button absent to aid me in sorting playable servers quickly and efficiently, but the browser itself seemed to be taking an incredibly long time to get a proper server listing, and also was devoid of useful information – all I got was a playercount, server name, a brief indication on if the server was dedicated and / or locked, and a ping rating (which showed 90% of the servers as being in the red, which I assumed was bad) – no current map information or any other secondary server info was immediately available unless I clicked on the server in question. Grimacing openly, I chose a server with 34 / 40 active players available – an odd number, given how the game is supposed to only support up to 32 players - only to get rejected with a “Server is full” notice and, irritatingly enough, also get thrown back to the “Join / Create” screen, rather than being directly put back into the server browser. I waded back in, refreshed, and sure enough that same server still had 34/40 players listed, but try as I might, I couldn’t join. Of course, having to deal with the world’s worst server browser wasn’t enough to scare me away from getting my Star Wars love, so I spent the next three minutes dutifully jumping from one server to the next. Finally, the gaming gods felt generous enough to end my suffering and actually let me into a damn server, and as I waited for game’s nifty loading screen to appear (load times are very quick, impressively enough) I rubbed my hands with glee in anticipation of the action I would soon be immersed in and stated at the “Joining Session…” screen.

And waited. Five seconds… more waiting. Ten… fifteen… twenty seconds…. more waiting. After the timer hit forty seconds, I figured something was up and tried to join another server, only to be hit with the same results. My enthusiasm quickly diminishing, I returned to the main menu and tried the whole process all over again. Eventually, I finally managed to join a server, where I was cursed with jumpy gameplay as a result of excess levels of latency, followed by a spontaneous crash when I briefly alt-tabbed out to check if any background processes were hogging up my bandwidth. Great. Eventually, I finally managed to get a session going, and the ensuing action was no more impressive. After picking a spawn point and watching from a spectator position as troops and vehicles randomly teleported across the terrain, I finally spawned in, only to watch a blaster bolt fly three feet in front of me, and yet somehow “hit” me in a manner sufficient to kill me on the spot. Becoming more annoyed by the second, I spawned again and hopped in a Rebel hovertank to go blow some stuff up – which I did, until an enemy AT-ST that was jumping around the landscape like crazy ended up appearing right in front of my tank, stopping it long enough for him to annihilate me. I attempted to bang out a chat message to congratulate the guy on his kill, but then ran into the game’s other fault – the appalling chat interface, which refused to register well over half of my keystrokes and ended up making anything I typed sound like it had come from the literary genius of a three-year-old. After getting killed a few more times die to my inattentive watching of people continuing to teleport around, I quit out of frustration and went to go see if the offline play was any better.

SW:BF happens offers a number of singleplayer components that basically revolve around a set of pre-assigned bot matches on specific levels, the first mode bearing a couple of selectable “campaigns” where you’re stuck on a given team, given a verbal pre-mission “briefing” on the current situation, and then sent out to crush, kill, and destroy. The missions themselves are actually nothing more than glorified instant action maps played out in a linear sequence, but the game tries to augment them with a bit of storyline through random FMV sequences (some of which had a fun habit of locking the game up). The other major singleplayer mode (aside from a simple Instant Action option) is “Galactic Conquest”, a slightly more novel experience where you take over the galaxy one planet at a time, obtaining different bonuses with each (such as being able to sabotage and cripple all enemy vehicles once a match starts, or getting extra reinforcements). This mode is actually pretty cool, and does a good job at showing off all of the different maps and settings available. Oddly enough, it was through these offline modes, complete with idiotic AI and slightly repetitive gameplay (as all singleplayer modes tend to suffer a little from) that I found myself having a far better experience than I was online, thanks primarily to the absence of ridiculous levels of latency. On that note, I suppose I should start describing how the game actually plays.

As explained earlier, the game revolves around a “capture and hold” mentality, in which two teams compete to control the most sectors on a given map to gain superiority – any point captured means a new area for your team to spawn from, and can often make for the turning tide in battle. Capturing a point involves the simple matter of walking up towards the evident green, red, or white glow of the capture point (the color changes depending on if your team controls it, the enemy team controls it, or the point is neutral, respectively) and standing nearby, trying to stay alive until the indicator at the right side of the screen fills up with green, indicating the point has been successfully converted to your team’s ownership. Enemies can interrupt the process by either shooting you in the face, or by also standing near the point (thusly putting the process on hold), hunting for your sorry ass cowering under a nearby table, and then shooting you in the face. Controlling the majority of spawn points on a map will result in the enemy team’s “ticket” count deteriorating slowly, and establishing total domination will begin a 20 second countdown, enabling your team to get an easy win provided they can hold all of the points for that long. Pretty simple gameplay that, once again, any Battlefield 1942 fan will feel right at home with, but the game also introduces another element into the equation: objectives.

Maps such as the Battle of Hoth have certain objectives that must be defended or destroyed, depending upon which team you are on, such as a shield generator, or a group of parked dropships. Usually this requires blustering through a heavy number of defenses, and then laying a huge amount of firepower into the target, but curiously enough, destroying these objectives didn’t seem to have any clear impact on gameplay. At the least, I commonly saw a dent in the enemy team’s ticket count, but this was surprisingly small and was the only actual effect I noticed. This confused me and really made me wonder what the whole point to the destroyable objectives was if not to severely hurt the enemy team, and sadly, the manual did little to enlighten me on this subject. Nevertheless, the Capture and Hold gameplay is solid, and thanks to a bunch of different character classes and vehicles, is tons of fun to play. The maps in Star Wars: Battlefront take place over a variety of different timelines in the universe, all the way from episodes 1-6, and this means that the available teams, weapons, and even levels can differ quite a bit in a given map. While certain levels will only have a set number of factions available (the mission for the cloning facilities at Kamino, for example, only offer battle between the CIS droids and Republic Clone Trooper forces from the recent Episode 2 movie), some allow for a choice between the Clone Wars and Galactic Civil War eras, letting players fight either for or against the Separatists forces or the mighty Empire. There are even more obscure choices available on some maps, such as fighting for the Gungans or Naboo security forces, offering even more variety.

As for the differing character classes, there are definitely quite a few to choose from. Each and every side in the game has access to a generic soldier, sniper, engineer, and heavy weapons class, but most are also blessed with unique character types that they can bring into play. As would be expected, soldiers are typically best at handling general ground combat, with an automatic blaster rifle that’s excellent for cutting down close and distant targets alike. Snipers, well… snipe, and heavy weapon soldiers basically lug around big rocket launchers suitable for damaging larger vehicles, while engineers (actually called “pilots” in the game) usually have unique support-styled weapons and can dispense ammo / health canisters to friendly units, as well as repair or reconstruct destroyed turrets – but their true capabilities come into bloom once they get into a vehicle, as they have the ability to automatically repair whatever they’re piloting on the fly. Faction-specific special characters, on the other hand, can end up being a variety of roles. The Imperial forces get a “Dark Trooper” that is not only armed with a nasty shotgun-type blaster, but can also use its jetpack to leap up to high places in a limited burst capacity, while the Rebels get a neato Wookie smuggler that is armed with a nasty Bowcaster and can also plant timed charges, which are pretty handy against vehicles if you can get close enough.

Going a little further back in the timeline, the cloned commandos of the Republic also have a jetpack trooper, but this particular rocketeer is a little easier to maneuver with because his jetpack will operate constantly until its charge runs out (rather than just being a one-big-burst-every-thirty-seconds deal like the Dark Trooper), and allows for a lot more flexibility in determining where to go. He is also equipped with a kick-ass EMP rifle that is perfectly suited for taking down droids, aside from the fact that it has limited ammo, suffers from a slow re-fire rate, and is hard to hit anything with at long range. Finally, the droids at the disposal of the CIS have access to the fearsome “Droideka”, which is one of the most powerful units on the battlefield. Controlling players can not only mow people down easily in a hail of blaster fire and then quickly convert into ball form like some kind of freakish robotic Samus Aran to zoom off and go ruin someone else’s day, but they also have a defensive shield that can soak up an insane amount of firepower before failing. The downside is that, aside from rolling all over the place kicking ass, they can’t really do much of anything else, including riding vehicles, and a dedicated jetpack trooper with an EMP rifle or two is usually enough to overwhelm the Droideka and bring it down. There are many other unit classes to play with as well, but you’ll just have to see them for yourself. On a side note, the game also has “heroes”, such as Count Dooku, Luke Skywalker, and even Darth Vader that can enter a given map based on the server settings, whom basically roam the level randomly bitch-slapping people with their lightsabers. Due to balance concerns (I guess) it’s not possible to play as them, but they’re nearly incapable of being killed (nearly) and do quite a neat job at scaring away the enemy team once they’ve locked on to somebody. The AI controlling these heroes is kind of idiotic to be honest, but it was cool to see them running around the field sticking it to my enemies.

Moving on, certain vehicles are, once again, only available on specific maps, the selection of which is also dependent whether you’re playing in the Clone Wars / Galactic Civil War era, but this means that there’s quite a bit to play with. Aspiring officers of the Empire will be proud to note that they’re allowed to stomp around in AT-ST’s, and yes, even AT-AT’s, causing total chaos and misery everywhere they go. These two rides are accurately modeled and beautifully animated, offering a position for a main driver and even a secondary gunner to help out with those elusive targets – but what really struck me was how insanely huge these things were. The AT-AT in particular really felt built to scale, and I was amazed at how much it towered over everything else as it marched into battle - until it stepped on me, of course. Continuing down the list, other vehicles of note include a number of standard ground attack hovertanks that are greatly armored, generally carry a pair of beefy blasters (with surprisingly huge splash damage that can send infantry flying all over the place), and have space for two people, zippy scout vehicles, such as the lethally-fast speeder bike, and even incredibly large and overwhelmingly powerful mobile command posts (which players can actually spawn from in the field), which include the aforementioned AT-AT, and much older AT-TE, which is another cool four-legged walker at the Republic’s disposal with a huge turret on the top, perfect for pulverizing random targets. There are even a few gunships that can be used to transport large numbers of players and rain death from above using their many turrets, so there are definitely more than enough authentic vehicle types to satisfy just about any Star Wars nut. My all-around favorite vehicle, however, has got to be the venerable snow-speeder. Fast, airborne, and decently armed with a pair of blasters, the snow-speeder’s true purpose is for taking down those nasty AT-ATs (as any half-assed Star Wars fan will automatically know) on the Battle of Hoth level. To do this, a co-pilot is required to sit in the rear gunner position to fire the tow-cable at the AT-AT’s legs when the timing is right, then the pilot is tasked with circling around the monstrous Imperial walker until he’s either shot out of the sky, or the walker trips and goes down. Very cool action, and fairly easy to do thanks to the way the camera changes to an orbit view once the tow cable is attached to ease navigation.