Ladies and gentlemen, I have decided that, despite having covered a Star Wars fan theory last time, I’m not quite finished with that galaxy far far away just yet.
With that in mind, I’d like to talk about Star Wars: Battlefront II. I really enjoyed the PS2 game, and I recently decided to pick up the modern iteration which was released a few years back, and I’d like to share a few… observations about it.
I should stress that I do like the game, but there are still a fair few things about it which really confuse or frustrate me. So let’s not waste any more time and just get started.
Now, an inescapable fact about this game is that it does share the name of a highly popular, older game. This means that comparisons between the two are pretty much inevitable. And to me, one of the noticeable differences has to do with what was, in my opinion, one of the best parts of the PS2 game: The space battles.
The interesting thing about the space battles in the old game was that… well, you weren’t just a ship zipping through space. You played a pilot, piloting a ship. At the start of the battles, you picked a pilot, and then you picked your ship and flew off into battle.
In the newer game, you just select your ship at the start and get dropped into the action. No takeoff, no choice in pilots…
Now, both games do give you the choice of three types of ships. But the newer one leaves something pretty big out. In the older game, there was also the fourth type of ship, the gunship.
And all of this leads me to the biggest disappointment about this mode in the newer game: You can’t land in enemy ships. That was the whole point of the gunship, after all. You could just land the ships in the enemy hangar and drop off a pile of allies, and you could destroy auto-defences, life support, shields generators and engines from within.
All that is missing from the newer game and it’s such a shame, because here, you could have the opportunity to play around with all the different capital ships of the Star Wars franchise, with different layouts depending on the type of ship. After all, there’s no reason the inside of a rebel alliance cruiser should be identical to a separatist dreadnought. You’d still have the choice to do the whole space dogfighting, but you could also lead landing parties.
Now, there might be some among you who think that this is ridiculous. You may argue that this would be a gargantuan effort, adding maps and additional mechanics, all in order to harken back to an old game.
And on the one hand, you may have a point. But on the other hand, I want you to remember two things. Firstly, they didn’t call this game Star Wars: Intergalactic War. They didn’t call it something like Battlefront 4 or Star Wars: Combat Frontier or anything like that.
They chose to call it Star Wars: Battlefront 2. And the problem, like I said before, about naming this game after a highly lauded older game means that people WILL make these kinds of comparisons. Yes, you get a lot of fans of the old game buying the new one. But those old fans will have some expecations of the new game.
And secondly, in the single player campaign, you DO land your ship in the hangar of an enemy capital ship and sabotage it from the inside. But in multiplayer? Not happening.
That’s not to say, of course, that the space battles are all disappointing. Far from it. After all, there are several space battle missions in the game. For example, you’re tasked with destroying or defending a Star Destroyer under construction, or you can fight in the skies over the cloning facility at Kamino, either attacking or defending it.
But having missions like these, with the addition of the landing parties… that would have added more facets to the game.
Just as an example, going back to that aforementioned attack on the star destroyer, at one point you have to disable the shields by disconnecting the holding clamps connecting it to the construction dock, so you can blow it up. Imagine if you could land inside the construction dock itself and disable the clamps from inside. You’d still have to deal with enemies inside the construction dock, and if you die, you’d have to fly all the way back and try again.
So you’d disable the shield, while your allies outside fight to blow up the star destroyer.
Again, I freely admit this might seem fanciful, but if you’re going use this name, then you’d better try your damndest not to be outdone by a game that was released a decade and a half ago!
But on that note, I will give some credit to the mechanics done to the various classes, both with their various cards, and with the choice of weapons.
Playing a class well enough, racking up kills, eventually unlocks new weapons for that class. So if you’re playing a specialist, i.e a sniper, you unlock better rifles. And using those rifles eventually earns you modifications, granting reduced recoil, improved zoom, faster projectiles etc.
But these unlockable weapons, combined with the weapon mechanics of the game, actually provides another headscratcher to me.
You see, all the various rifles in the game feature an overheating meter, so if you fire for long enough, the weapon needs to cool down. You also have a small quick time event where, if you click at the right time, you instantly cool down the weapon or, if you manage to get it exactly right, the weapon becomes temporarily immune to overheating.
However, this becomes extremely confusing with one particular unlockable rifle for the specialist: The cycler rifle.
You see, the cycler rifle is what in the Star Wars universe is referred to as a ”slugthrower”. It is, in other words, a normal rifle, firing bullets rather than blaster bolts.
But if this is the case, then why is it overheating like a blaster rifle? Not only that, but it overheats far worse! Three shots, and it needs to cool down. Meanwhile, your standard rifle shooting superheated plasma bolts can fire 10 shots until it overheats.
Which to me raises not only the questions of what kind of crap material these cycler rifles are made of, but also why they would be given to soldiers at all, given the aforementioned crap materials!
But this is really only one quibble in what, again, I think is a pretty solid set of mechanics.
Now, the next thing I’d like to talk about concerns the various heroes and villains of the game. It’s not that I dislike them, but there are a few… weird things about them. The first, and lesser problem has to do with the unlockable appearances.
Mainly, the problem is that there are so many outfits you’d think would be here, but aren’t… and there are some that have no reason to be there, but are.
For example, you have Rey as a playable character. Rey has six different outfits, one of which is just her jedi robes, but with a hood on. Meanwhile, you have Finn, who only has two outfits. They couldn’t even give him the bloodied stormtrooper armor?
You have Obi-Wan Kenobi, who has three different outfits, but there’s no old Ben Kenobi skin. In fact, there’s no old version of any character. There’s no old Luke, Leia or Han outfits.
There’s not even an old version of Iden Versio, the main character of the solo campaign, despite being a playable character!
Now, you might be saying that it’d be a bit weird if, say, an old Luke Skywalker appeared during the battle of Hoth or an old Leia was at Endor…
But at the same time, you can unlock young versions of both Han Solo and Lando Calrissian for play on maps where they really shouldn’t be, and you have Yoda fighting for the rebel alliance, so it’s not like anachronisms are that much of an issue.
And also, you can’t really argue that it’d look weird, when you have Count Dooku, who has three different outfits… one of which are his damn pyjamas!
It’s just this weird confused disconnect. Do you want it to be serious? Then why give us pyajama party Dooku? You want to go all out, then go all out! Give us young, Episode 3 Darth Vader and Palpatine. Give us old Luke Skywalker and bloodied armor Finn.
But this is the lesser issue I have. The bigger issue with the heroes are just the choices of heroes. More specifically, who they decided to add, and the ones they decided to leave out.
Keep in mind, these are the designated central characters of the Star Wars franchise. You have Finn and Rey and Kylo Ren and Luke and Leia and and Obi Wan Kenobi and Bossk.
That’s right. Bossk. You know Bossk, right? Who can forget about good old Bossk, the lizard guy who was in ONE SINGLE SCENE in The Empire Strikes Back. A scene wherein he didn’t say or do anything!
But sure, HE got to be in the game, but not Wicket the Ewok? We got Bossk instead of, say, Assaj Ventress?
I played the old Shadow of the Empire game for the N64, and let me tell you, if we could have played as IG-88, that would have been amazing!
After all, why not? He had just as much screentime as Bossk, and at least he made an appearance in a video game. But no, there’s no IG-88.
There’s also no Mace Windu, no Jango Fett, No Qui-Gon Jinn, no Ahsoka Tano, no Cad Bane…
And it goes further! This game has Scarif as a map. They have special models for the shore troopers, who were on Scarif.
But they don’t have a single hero from Rogue One! No Jyn Erso, no Cassian Andor, no Saw Gerrera, no Director Krennic, no K-2SO, not a one!
Meanwhile, you play a battle between the rebel alliance and the Empire, and you can have Darth Maul as a playable character, despite A) not being associated with the Empire and B) being dead at the time!
And among the dark side heroes, fighting for the First Order… you have BB-9E, the little sphere robot who was barely a character in The Last Jedi!
If you’re just gonna cram in characters who make no sense, why not just give us Supreme Leader Snoke as a character? At least he was shown to be incredibly powerful! And don’t tell me it’s because he didn’t do any actual fighting, because neither did BB-9E!
Now, I’m guessing they wanted an equal number of good guys and bad guys, but even with 11 for each side, there are times when one side will still have more heroes than the other.
For example, circling it all back to the space battles, there are three different versions of the Millenium Falcon available, giving the heroes 7 heroes compared to the villains 5 And the dark side has Darth Maul, flying the Scimitar. And what prequel trilogy starfighter do they have for the light side, as his opposite? Do they have Anakin Skywalker? Maybe Obi-Wan in his Ep. 2 starfighter? That would make sense, seeing as Obi-Wan actually had a dogfight in space against Jango Fett…
But no, instead you play as the immensely famous-as-a-starfighter-pilot Yoda! And while yes, he DID fly a spaceship in the Clone Wars tv series (which also makes you wonder why we didn’t get Ahsoka Tano in this game) they didn’t get his ship right! It’s just the ships Obi-Wan and Anakin flew in episode 3, but painted green!
You see what I mean about their bizarre choices in heroes?! They could have had either Anakin or Obi-Wan, with only different voice clips and a colour change, and it’d that much more sense, but they DELIBERATELY picked the green muppet!
Anyway, I believe that’s all my quibbles with this game. Overall, I do still enjoy it, but it’s such a shame that you can spot so many missed opportunities and strange choices.
Devil in the Details 