Introduction
The second in the series of Star Wars "Battlefield" style games, which combine large scale FPS and vehicle action. In this game you can not only play any infantry unit from the game, but also pretty much any vehicle, spacecraft and hero as well.
Gameplay
Although there is a short series of missions, and a "strategy map" based campaign, this game is really based around a variety of different skirmish set-ups.
The maps are large and open, and support a large number of players/bots, in army style clashes similar to those seen in the films. When you spawn, you get to choose a class (trooper, sniper, engineer etc.) and the objective is to gain and capture command points. As you get kills and capture points, you get to unlock better classes, and if you do well enough, you may even get to play the hero for that map for a limited period. Most battlefields have a couple of vehicles lying about for you to play with as well.
In addition to these, there are the space battles. In these you start off in the hangar of a battleship, where you can grab a star fighter and go off and fight the enemy. The object of the battle is to reach a goal of points before the enemy, by destroying their fighters and targets on the mothership, or by landing in their hangar and sabotaging their critical systems.
I've not played the multiplayer as much as the single player, but from what I could tell, it's pretty much the same thing but with players instead of bots. Most of what I mention here is applicable to both.
Sights and Sounds
The graphics are, by today’s PC standards, nothing to shout about. It doesn't have many of the lighting and particle effects seen in other recent similar games. But in the defence of the simple graphics, they do allow the large-scale battles to play out with a lot of slow down. I could put on as many bots as I liked without any noticeable problems. The only time I lost frame rate was on Felicia, a poorly planned, open map with horrendous amounts of plant life.
Sound wise, it's basically sound and music lifted from the films. "Death Star March" is an excellent tune to kill to
Stuff that's good
This game is about as varied as they come. The are elements of FPS, strategy, hack and slash, vehicle combat, and flight sim in this game, which all it to keep up your interest for a long period of time.
It's also quite an accessible game, and despite the wide range of play modes, it was simple to get to grips with each one easily. In particular I liked how the space fighters were quite playable with a mouse. Pressing Alt makes you craft perform a stunt manoeuvre, allowing you to dodge or turn quickly without having to roll your mouse over the desk five times.
There are several rewards you can earn in game, for things like getting so many headshots or points in one life, which give you bonus damage or energy etc. These are kept track in your player stats too, which adds a little bit of interest.
There are a good variety of skirmishes too, which generate a good deal of multi- and single-player fun. One mission allows players on both sides to choose any hero in massive lightsabre smash-up. Another one allows you to create a fucking massive battle on Hoth in which you can pilot an AT-AT and pwn buckets of rebel scum. But best of all are the "hunt" levels, the objective of which is to kill as many Ewoks or Gunguns as possible. This alone is probably a good enough reason to play this game
Stuff that sucks
Firstly, the single player campaign isn't very inspiring. It doesn't use much in the way of cinematics, and the cut scenes are either lifted from the films, or, bizarrely, poor quality videos of in game footage. There is a voice over of the guy who played Jango Fett giving some plot, but it's not really all that interesting.
There is also a single player strategy campaign thing, with a map where you have to capture planets and conquer the galaxy. Winning battles gives you credits to spend on extra troop types and bonuses. But there's not actually much strategy to it. Like the campaign, it's merely a device to string together a series of skirmishes. This is only reinforced by the fact that the same handful of maps are recycled shamelessly throughout the single and multiplayer games.
But perhaps the main problem with this game is that although it involves so many different elements, none of them actually work very well.
In first person mode, the guns are pretty useless and unsatisfying to use. Most of the "elite" classes aren't all that much better than the standard ones, and I usually ended up using the engineer all the time, since it can spawn its own health powerups.
Heroes are fun for a little bit, but are pretty limited. Combat usually involves running into a large group of enemies whilst randomly swinging your light sabre.
The space fighter game is fairly limited as well, and quite poorly designed in places. You spawn in the hangar and have to run to a fighter, which are often half-inched by the bots, so basically you end up playing the whole game in whatever fighter you chose first. The light fighters are useless, and winning the game mainly involves sitting in a heavily armoured bomber and picking off any bots that run in front of your sights. Invading the enemy mother is fairly impossible, and bombing it is fairly dull.
And so on. I could list the minor faults with each section of the game all day, but I hope that gives a fair impression of what I'm getting at. Basically, because this game tries to do such a wide range of things, it fails to do any of them amazingly well. Therefore it is completely outclassed by other games in the same genre/s.
Conclusion
"Jack of all trades, master of none" sums this game up pretty well. Or possibly "quantity, not quality". Like the later films, this game tries to do too much, and ultimately feels a bit unsatisfying. I can't help feeling that the designers would have done much better job if they had focused just on one film or area of the star wars universe, rather than trying to recreate the entire universe.
In its defence though this game did keep me entertained for a reasonable amount of time, because there are just so many different elements to experiment with and explore. Plus, it's Star Wars, and an awful lot of Star Wars too, which can't be bad
All in all, it's a fun toy to play around with for a few days. But after that its likely to get left on a shelf and never picked up again, simply because none of it's play modes compare to those in more focused games.
Probably a good subject for a case study in game design or something.
Score :
