Star Wars: Battlefront Hands-On

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Tags: Categories: PC Previews, PS2 Previews, Previews, Xbox Previews

Posted by Tim Torres on Sep 17th, 2004


Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic aside, how long has it been since a good Star Wars game? Jedi Outcast, right? Or maybe as far back as Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight? Well, either way, it’s been quite a while. But if my three hours with the PC version of Star Wars: Battlefront is any clue our time without a good game based on the beloved series is over. (Just in time for those DVDs too!!) And even though there are no Force powers this title seems to pack enough firepower, and overall Star Wars goodness, to keep even the most jaded prequel-hating fan playing for hours.

So here’s how its multiplayer mode plays. For an FPS (you can switch between 1st and 3rd-person views) the controls are very simple. Two weapons, short- and long-range to switch through, grenades, a zoom button and standard crouch and move buttons – very Halo-esque. In fact, it’s pretty fair to say Battlefront is like Halo in the Star Wars universe. But there are differences of course! Otherwise, what would be the point?


First, games can be set in either the Clone Wars timeline or the original trilogy’s Rebellion vs. Empire setting, with players free to choose either side according to the timeline they’re in: the Separatist Droids vs. the Republic Clone Troopers or the Rebels vs. the Imperials. Like in Team Fortress each team has a different set of classes with different weapons. There’s the average run-of-the-mill guy, the heavy rocket launcher guy, the sniper guy, and even the jetpack guy.

Perhaps the weirdest character to play as is the Destroyer droid from the Clone Wars timeline. Y’know, they’re the roly-poly droids with shields that made Amidala and co. surrender in Phantom Menace’s climax. Well, you can pretty much do what they did in the movies like activating impenetrable shields and rolling up into a Metroid-ish ball, which is the only real way for them to move around, otherwise they’re pretty slow. They’re like mini tanks. It was kind of difficult to control them in their morph ball mode though. They go fast.


Anyway, the game starts up and you select your team, then your class. You play for a while till you die, then you can select a new class and respawn, which is very cool so you can adapt to the battle by choosing the most appropriate class for the situation. Foolishly, I never knew you could select your respawn point and in some levels, primarily Hoth, I always ended up farthest away from the main action, which made movement cumbersome since the battle arenas are huge. Hoth must’ve been the biggest map but thankfully there are vehicles on most worlds, and Hoth alone had Taun Tauns, snowspeeders, AT-ATs, AT-STs… the works.


The greatest thing about this game is that you really can faithfully re-enact the battles from the movies and the vehicles help make that even more accurate. However, I found the vehicles to be the game’s biggest fault. They were just too damn difficult to control though now that I think about it I never did see if you could switch to 3rd-person view while in a vehicle… because that would’ve made it much easier. Either way, it was awkward. Flying vehicles used those disorienting backwards flight controls and all vehicles had really limited visual range. But that’s all probably just because I’m not very good at the game yet.

Since I got to play this at last weekend’s iGames Expo in New York City it was everyone’s first time playing the game and the expo guys saw it fit to hold the first ever Star Wars: Battlefront tournament on a level playing field. Sort of. It was basically a whoever-has-the-most-kills-after-five-rounds-wins-a-prize thing and I swear, whoever won had to have studied the demo or something because he was playing with Jedi-like reflexes. Yeesh.


After a few server problems (the first round was cut short for some disconnection reason) the game finally got into full swing and everyone was pumped. At this time I started to get a better hang of the team aspect of play and how important the zoom feature is since the maps in Battlefront are expansive. Because of this vastness there are several hot points in each map that teams must take over to win. The more hot points (like the rebel’s shield generator on Hoth or Count Dooku’s stronghold on Geonosis) that are taken over the easier it is for a team to win the round and the more team members you have at a hot point, the less time to capture it. You can also deplete the other team’s resources by destroying their vehicles. To see each team’s progress there are the teams’ “life bars” at the top of the HUD.

I don’t know the technical terms for any of this or if I’m accurate; this is just what I noticed from three hours of playing a solid multiplayer game, and the best Star Wars game I’ve played in a looooong time.


Once the tourney was done, the grand prize winner got a snazzy new keyboard and mouse combo, while other prizes were t-shirts and um… a computer fan… glowy… thing. I don’t know. But everyone got nVidia mousepads which is pretty sweet. I haven’t had a mousepad since my IBM Aptiva in 1995.

Mousepad in hand, I left Battlefront very much satisfied, looking forward to when I can knock over AT-ATs and blast Ewoks in the face with my own copy.

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