EA's Star Wars Battlefront II in 2019

Ah Star Wars, I've loved this franchise since I was a boy, I saw Episode II when I was 5 and was enthralled by namely the final battle of the movie with the desert and all the lasers and the explosions and the starships. Movie has aged poorly now but it got my foot in the door to being a Star Wars fanatic, I played the Jedi Knight and Rogue Squadron games on Gamecube, the Battlefront and Republic Commando games on Xbox, and watched the Star Wars Clone Wars Animated series from 2003. Overtime though I fell out with the series, haven't read the new books, don't play the mobile game, only watched the 2008 The Clone Wars Animated Series. Just haven't been in love with Star Wars since at least 2010. So when Star Wars Battlefront II from EA dropped I just sorta slept on it, but in Winter 2018 it was $10 on Origin so I picked it up. I know this game has a lot of hate, I jumped on it too when it dropped at first; but I saw the new movies so I was interested in the plot here. How is Battlefront II now that a year and a half has passed?

Well let's start with the things that haven't changed. The graphics have aged very well, this game's environments still look gorgeous in 2019 and even most of the character models have aged well unless you're pudgy Luke Skywalker or have a beard. Because for some reason beards look terrible on Frostbite and I don't know why. Sound design is also still kickin too, with all the vehicles and weapons sounded exactly how you would expect. VA is also fairly solid unless you're Luke... again. Musical cues work well and even the original sountrack, while not memeorable, evokes the Williams tracks well.

Campaign and base gameplay are all right, it's a standard shooter with cards to determine modifiers to abilities you spawn with either in single player missions or as a class in multiplayer. Galactic Assault, a story driven objective mode, has still aged well and is worth popping in as has Starfighter Assault. Even if I only just now got Mouse and Keyboard to work right with the starships, controller felt so much better for the longest time. But for the most part it's still chaotic fun that at least tries to give context to multiplayer matches, like Halo 4 in a way.

Campaign is only special in that it's simultaneously feels long enough and also too short. In terms of gameplay the length is fine, nothing special and a nice variety of on foot, hero, and starfighter missions to keep things from getting overly stale. But the story needed to be better told, it feels like there's an entire first part just missing to this story with our leads in the empire's Inferno Squad, and it felt like it needed more time before Inferno is ripped apart by changing loayltys post-Episode VI. With that said the rebel alien commander who joins Inferno, Shriv, adds a lot of life to the plot; contrasting the main characters with his dry wit and befuddled mother characterization. But this story needed more time to bake.

Okay, but that's all of the unchanged things out of the way, let's talk things that did change and oh boy. Primarily everything multiplayer wise was re-balanced and for the better. Where previously you only got Iden Versio, Inferno Squad's Commander, as the hero you can unlock upon reaching an in match point threshold. Now everyone can be used from the get go, no loot boxes needed; and it's a great change knowing that me playing as Anakin Skywalker is just a matter of how good I am at the game as opposed to if I played the Star Wars casino. And that's not my wording, that's the BBC and the various lawmakers who bashed this game and introduced legislation against it.

Now in terms of content first off we have new heroes; so far Finn, Captain Phasma, General Grevious, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Count Sudoku, and Anakin Skywalker have been added along with a whole plethora of outfits for both normal in game-classes and heroes. This is where the games microtransactions come back into play but honestly, I didn't feel tempted to pay because, outside of microtransactions, it's easy to get what I want with the ingame currency anyway. Though I am still pissed that I can't get Rey's Jedi robes form Episode VIII, I liked that outfit and locking it behind pre-order's pisses me off.

My petty fashion issues aside, there's also a new game mode, Captial Supremacy which is like galactic assault meets the old conquest mode. Two teams battle to control the map long enough to summon reinforcements and once one team reaches the threshold they will board the enemy ship and battle to breach and blow it up from the inside. It's actually pretty fun and the new class, infiltrator, is pretty great too. It's a great callback to old Battlefront, even if I would prefer just a straight conquest mode to this. I'll take what I can get here. On top of this two new maps were added, Clone Wars Geonosis and Episode VIII Crait, both of which look gorgeous and are fun, even if Crait is a bit skewed to the First Order in the first third. My only complaint is that all the content from late 2018 to now has been largely Clone Wars based where I would like more OT and Sequel content. But with Episode IX around the corner, we may get something at least for sequel fans.

But the biggest change made was to Star Cards, the things that mod abilities for your classes and heroes. At launch it was a pay to win casino as to what you got in terms of cards and therefore power. Now here the more you play as a class or hero, the higher you level, and the more cards/chances to level them  up you get.  I'm not a revolutionary when I say I really like this change, as it encourages learning each class and playing more with them to get better abilities. Personally I've power leveled the heavy and am now leveling the assault class and haven't felt tempted to buy microtransactions at all. And if you're gonna do it, that's the way I like it, optional and cosmetic only.

And that's the real lesson here; if you make it optional and don't shove fans into it, micro-transactions are tolerable, at least in multiplayer games. But when you skew the game in favor of those with the fattest wallet you piss a lot of people off, including Disney evidently. I do admire the fact that DICE had every reason to burn this game to the ground and start again and chose not to. Instead breathing new life into Battlefront II and making a great mindless shooter. Which sounds like an insult but sometimes I just want to shut my brain off and pretend I'm in the Clone Wars goddammit so it's a compliment. For $20-30, you can do a lot worse... though I would recommend a lot of other games to buy before it unless you really like Star Wars.

(Side Note: I like the idea of Iden Versio as a character, but I feel like she should have been given more time in the empire and with the whole Inferno Squad before the inevitable change of sides.)