If anything, I wish Battlefront was more asymmetrical, as most modes devolve into simply soldiers vs soldiers with very similar guns on both sides. This is the nature of an asymmetrical game: everyone thinks they got dealt a bum hand. I've seen complaints that this mode is too weighted in favour of the Empire and their enormous, marching death machine but a) the idea is that it's a really, really big deal to take down an AT-AT: the entire point is that it's unfair b) equally, I've read complaints that the Empire and their bright white Stormtrooper outfits are at a disadvantage everywhere but Hoth. This mode feels cinematic, for lack of a better word: it has inherent drama, reaching far beyond each player's interest in their own score. Probably the bigger draw still, though, is Walker Assault, an asymmetrical mode which sees the Imperials defending a giant AT-AT as it stomps inexorably towards a Rebel base, while said Rebels try to seize capture points which will render the AT-AT more vulnerable if held.Īgain, it feels like a battle with a purpose beyond win or lose, and as in the movies, an AT-AT is an irresistibly appealing centrepiece. The essential tension of capture points swapping back and forth, and the idea that the Rebels and Imperials are vying for control of this place rather than simply to get more points, lends Supremacy a purpose and a faint unpredictably that the smaller Blast team deathmatch mode lacks. The effect is fantastic, even if it is mostly set-dressing. The landscape, meanwhile, gets cameo appearances from the likes of Ewoks and Jawas in addition to static but no less warmly familiar vehicles and buildings. The skies are filled with ships at war, the smaller ones of which are in some cases player-controlled, but the larger ones are simply scenery.
What it loses in classes and specialisation - everyone is simply a soldier with a single gun - it to some degree compensates for with huge, gorgeous maps based on Hoth, Endor, Tatooine and a new, overwhelmingly grey planet named Sullust. Supremacy is a simplified take on the Battlefield series' well-loved tug of war point-capture mode. The headcount, and the scale that entails, means they feel like a Star Wars scene, whereas the other, smaller modes feel much more like any old shooter which just so happens to have a Star Wars skin. Its stand-outs are two of its nine different modes, and it's probably no coincidence that those happen to be the only 40-player modes. Get into the groove of its twitchy, straight-up, rapid-death action and it functions perfectly well as a graphically-beautiful team shooter in its own right - so long as you're already pretty adept at such things. Sit back to watch (and hear) its largest battles unfold, hordes of Stormtroopers and Rebels colliding across an explosion-littered Endor, Hoth or Tatooine as exploding spaceships both small and titanic pepper the skies, and it's everything anyone could possibly want from a Star Wars game. And its sound, its bombastically familiar audio arsenal of precisely-recreated roars and zaps and bangs, its soaring brass and strings, is beyond spectacular. It really does look like that in practice. Just as The Phantom Menace still hit the high notes with its bravura podracing scene and its demonic Sith Lord with his fancy-pants lightsaber, EA's online shooter Battlefront very much has its stand-out moments. I've opened cruelly, but it's not a complete summary of my feelings about Star Wars Battlefront. 16 years after cosmic expectations were brought crashing down to Earth when the Phantom Menace started droning on about the taxation of trade routes, poor old Star Wars still seems helpless to prevent the profoundly exciting from becoming slightly tedious.
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