Battlefront II Review
At first glance it seemed the developers of Battlefront 2 listened to the feedback on the previous title. Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, this is obviously not quite the case. After a couple hours of gameplay it becomes clear that EA, and it's associated developers, merely heard the playerbase rather than truly listened.
The first, and arguably most glaring, change to the series was the addition of a single player campaign which follows the story of Empire special forces soldier, Iden Versio. The prologue has you escaping from rebel capture. After this short introductory mission it starts to set the scene for an almost Rogue One style story that follows soldiers of the empire. Fairly early in the story the first real fan service appears in a rather delightful way. It really, almost humanizes the stormtroopers in a way the games or movies rarely do. If you are like me you are used to stormtroopers being lambs, who have incredibly bad aim, sent to the slaughter. Normally I'd think nothing of it. Battlefront 2 on the other hand, has you in the position of one of the most elite foot soldiers the Empire has to offer. Certain events lead you to almost feel for the characters in a way I wasn't expecting. By the time I had finished the second or third mission, I was ready for more and wanted to see where it went.
I really should have known better. Not long after you get into the story and become interested in the main character and her story, Battlefront 2 sends you to go play the hero characters at an alarming rate. By the second act the game has you playing heroes on every other mission. These should be the best parts of the campaign, I mean, you get to play as your favorite characters from the Star Wars universe. On the contrary, I'd argue that they're the worst. The nonstop, force-fed fan service got really old really quick. It's almost as if they thought of it as a hero character tutorial for the multiplayer. Realistically, there are only two hero types. There are heroes with guns, and heroes with lightsabers. Sure they have their own abilities but even those are mechanically identical to abilities of other characters in that hero type. To put so much of the campaign into this hero play gives a false sense of mission differentiation.
Beyond the sheer repetitiveness of the hero missions, they have terrible character dialog. It's the kind of banter that almost makes you physically uncomfortable. That banter mostly exists in the hero missions. When you play as Iden Versio it is much more serious with the occasional back and forth between Iden and, her second in command, Del Meeko. Those missions are, without a doubt, the best the game has to offer. Even then it feels like the campaign from a Battlefield game. Because of the severe lack of time spent with Iden and Del, there isn't enough time to fully develop the characters, and by the end of the game it shows. Multiple times the game makes ham-fisted attempts at heartfelt and heart-wrenching moments that makes me feel as if I missed a sizable chunk of character development.
At least some particular hero scenes made me laugh. It certainly wasn't the, less than witty, repartee of the characters. The humor came in the form of ever so slightly unusual facial animations. When a well known character in the Star Wars universe is supposed to give a cocky smile but instead just ends up looking like he is having a stroke, it's a problem. Every hero who has an associated actor looks close enough to that actor to be mistaken for them in passing. The differences between the character model and the actual actor are minor but in an unsettling way. It's almost as if you should know them but deep down you feel like you don't. Simple things like that can really throw off the sense of immersion in the story.
That being said, the graphics in the game are really quite stunning. Just because the facial animations are a little off and the actor likenesses are not so actor-like, that doesn't mean that the visuals aren't collectively good. Similar to the first game, a lot of time clearly went into the development of the environments and models. You see the forests of Endor and you know right where you are. Even the bland deserts of Jakku and Tatooine manage to be awe inspiring. Of the few guns that are in the game, I could look at them without context and say, "yup, that's from Star Wars." The explosions are pleasantly somber in a way that reminds you that DICE and the Frostbite engine are responsible. Discounting a few bugs I saw, the lighting is great and sets the mood for the game fairly well. Occasionally I experienced a failure in brightness shift upon entering dark buildings from bright exteriors. Although fairly infrequent, this made a decent portion a multiplayer match entirely unplayable as I could barely even see my own character model. Other than that one time, I never had the problem again.
As beautiful as the game looks its gets driven home by the sound design. Of course most of the blaster sounds and everything aren't noticeably improved upon from the last game. It's just that it all sounds so distinctly Star Wars. From the sound of lasers flying around the battlefield to the roar of TIE fighter engines flying by, if you have heard Star Wars, that is what it sounds like. There really isn't that much else to say about the sound design. If you like hearing droids say, "roger, roger!" then you are in luck. Some of the sound clips in multiplayer get a little repetitive, especially with the droids. Even though I grew up with the prequels I found myself getting tired of robots giving me vague statistical values on the efficiency of our assault on the clones. It's almost as if I was never meant to be hearing them that often.
Maybe it's because I've played more multiplayer games on Kashyyyk than any other map by a country mile. Whether it be intentional or just dumb luck, I have been put into games on that map probably about forty percent of the time. It's not like it's a bad map. I just want to play something else for once. There are supposed to be eleven maps and I've played ten of them. I've put thirteen hours into this game and haven't seen all the maps. I've seen less maps than the amount of levels I've gained from playing the few that I have seen. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe not all of the maps are released yet and I am just dumb. Naturally my instinct was to look for Hoth, the only map I haven't played, in the server browser. That's when I discovered something shocking. There is no server browser. I recognize the scale of that issue almost makes it irrelevant, but I want to play the whole game and I have no way of doing that because I can't play that last map. I have played every game mode except the hero mode and I still haven't found Hoth. Surely one day I will play that map and when I do I can focus more on complaining about the plethora of problems with the multiplayer progression.
Of course, when you play a game that contains experience points and get enough of them you level up. What happens after that? Battlefront 2 presents an interesting answer: nothing. Leveling up your player level in Battlefront 2 yields no immediate results. It just makes a number go up. The levels that truly matter are your class levels. At predetermined class levels you get a slot for star cards totaling to 3 card slots at a class level of 10. These cards tend to be a boost to healing , a reduction to damage taken, or something similar. They can also be abilities that will take the place of default class abilities. This is already insanely complicated but to make matters worse they don't come out and tell you how to level your class. Astonishingly, playing a class has almost nothing to do with leveling it. In order to do so you must obtain cards for that class. How do you get cards? You buy obscenely priced loot boxes. While they can be purchased with the in-game currency, called credits, it takes an astronomical amount of time to achieve that kind of money. Playing an entire match will usually result in only 300 - 500 credits. A loot crate costs 4,000 credits. Just thinking about how long it would take to get anywhere with that system makes me want to stop playing the game all together. But I won't.
If I just relax, ignore the garbage between games, and just enjoy the Star Wars-ness of it all, I have a good time. The game just handles exactly how I would want it to. Having played a decent amount of multiplayer I still don't really have any issues with the gameplay itself. All the problems lie in the bits and pieces holding it all together. Sure the weapon selection is shallow, but with that abhorrent progression model I'm okay with that. As far as first person shooters go, this is decent. It plays like a battlefield game because, if we are all honest with the game and ourselves, it is one. And it certainly isn't a bad thing. The shooting and moving feel good. A lot of games, in my opinion, get the damage model wrong. Battlefront2 manages to hit it perfectly for me. It takes just as many shots as I'd expect to kill somebody with a blaster in that game. There may be some exceptions, but for the most part this holds true.
To top it all off and add a little more flavor to the gunplay, they remove the ammo limit and insert an active reload system. In the active reload system there are two reload points: a blue bar and a yellow bar. Hitting the blue bar will reload your gun quicker but waiting longer for the yellow will result in a short duration of unlimited shots without having to reload. More than once I have found myself hiding in cover because I decided to wait for the yellow bar so I could really rain down on the enemy. Other times I would be in close quarters and needed to reload as soon as possible. However, the fastest way to reload is to do so before you even need to. All of this has led to some interesting moments.
Where the mechanics fails is in the starship battles. Almost immediately after starting a space battle, I realized the loop of that game mode. Spawn, shoot, die, repeat. It is that process to a T. My experience every time has been this: I fly in, shoot down an enemy within half a second of contact, take a few hits, make extreme evasive maneuvers, then die anyway. There is no variety to it at all. Shooting down an enemy is far too easy. The game tells you exactly where to shoot, you point your mouse cursor, then click for a half a second and congratulations, you got a kill. If I wanted that experience I'd have bought a point and click adventure game.
With all of the misgivings I have and all of the clearly poor design choices, I will still continue playing this game. Barring the story, it all adds up to a decent experience. Ignoring the progression model and my poor luck with finding maps, I know I'll have a little more fun with this game. The way I see it, Battlefront 2 is an excellent game to play with friends while chatting about other, better games.
