Star Wars Battlefront Review
Star Wars Battlefront is a major release for a couple big reasons. One, it’s EA’s first major release as custodian of the Star Wars gaming rights. And two, it’s a long-awaited installment in a popular Star Wars game series that some fans have very ingrained opinions of. There are simply those who can not let go of the gameplay of the the Battlefront games in the early 2000s, and those people will never be happy with whatever EA brought out even if they simply made a HD version of Battlefront II. For everyone else, EA’s Star Wars Battlefront brings the franchise into modern gaming and is a fantastic start to their stewardship of Star Wars in the gaming space. Will you love it as much as me? Well, that depends…
Star Wars Battlefront is a multi-player centric first person shooter. That right there is going to be a stinger for many people as the game really doesn’t have a single-player campaign. There are many single-player “missions”, which are a lot of fun to do, but they are very arcade-style and don’t follow any set story from one mission to another. These missions, which include both on-foot and flying stages, are really fun and I play to go for high ratings on all of them, but there are those who simply will not pay for a game if it doesn’t have a single-player story. For those people, Battlefront isn’t the game they’re looking for.
In 2015 I’d even argue that the FPS genre as a whole isn’t really for them as it now sort of leans more towards the competitive multi-player aspect more and more and less towards single-player stories. Sure Halo always has a campaign, and the Call of Duty games do as well, but you are seriously deluding yourself if you think that’s where the focus of the games really are. Even Blizzard’s new shooter Overwatch is going to be a multi-player online-only affair, and the new Rainbow Six isn’t going to have a campaign either. A FPS isn’t really where you should be looking for a deep story these days, and if you want a Star Wars game like that Amy Hennig is leading a team at EA Visceral to give you just that in a year or so.
And yes, I know someone will start screaming “but I shouldn’t be $60 then!” Well, if you don’t want to pay $60 for a video game, then you shouldn’t expect the sort of production values that EA DICE poured into Star Wars: Battlefront. The argument against a $50 “Season Pass” in a FPS game also hit a brick wall five years ago and is absolutely standard practice for games in 2015, especially shooters that deliver map packs over an entire year following the release of the game. Those new maps don’t make themselves for free, and the developers making them have to eat too.
With the ranting against the detractors out of the way, I’ll say that if you can deal with Star Wars Battlefront being a multi-player online first-person-shooter and you’re a Star Wars fan you’re probably going to love this game. On the next page, I’ll tell you exactly why that’s so.