Fox's Review: Star Wars Battlefront II

[Fusion]

Weeeeee're back (sadly, without a screenshot) with Star Wars: Battlefront 2. The "Sequel to the best-selling Star Wars game of all time" (as if that weren't suddenly obvious).

The game is mainly based around the events of Episode III, since most if not all of the locales are from that game.  Felucia, Mustafar, Utapau, Coruscant, the Tantive IV, and even that damn asteroid Yoda fled to are featured in the game.  On a side note there's a couple of new modes, Galactic Conquest being a type of board game where you've got to conquer every locale the game has to offer.  Quite boring, actually.  There's the classic Instant Action, and you can develop a "playlist" of levels so you can just go from one to another.  The bad thing is, when you go from one to another you don't get any hint of what a specific level looks like.

Unlike the previous game, you can choose a specific era on most of the levels, even though usually it doesn't matter what you pick because you'll run through the same terrain with the same kinds of characters fighting the same types of enemies who use the same strategies and give you the same comments for killing the same enemy numerous times.  You don't even get to choose a custom weapons layout... Just a class of soldier, that's it.  Oh!  But wait!  Let's say you're playing for the CIs (which should be called Separatists instead) and want to play as a regular battle droid!  Sorry, you can't play as a regular Battle Droid.   The generic shooter-class droid is a Super Battle Droid.

There are a few perks, though.  More levels have drivable vehicles.  Drivable, not flyable.  There are no flyable vehicles on land maps any more, probably because they changed aircraft code around.  It sucks, 'cause now you can't go wailin' in an X-Wing doing an air raid on an enemy's ground forces.  Space kinda sucks, too, all because the pilots of all the ships somehow can make ships do 180 degree turns within microseconds that the player, under no circumstance, can do.  You can board enemy ships... But it's just lackluster and even if you bring a landing craft along, you're better off staying in the pilot's seat, 'cause if you give it up someone will spawn and fly that thing out of there.  Then again... The A.I. intentionally crashes Snowspeeders on Hoth trying to wrap up an AT-AT, so there's not much to say there.

The A.I... Ugh.  You could strafe around them and kill them easily.  Or just try to shoot them and end up failing horribly.  Let me put it this way: A lot of A.I. controlled jedi spam saber throw, and a lot of A.I controlled Sith spam Lightning.  That and otherwise aside from the sudden 180 degree turns the flight A.I makes, they pilot like rookies.  I swear, taking on 36 TIE fighters in one Milllenium Falcon was much more hell-raising in X-Wing Alliance.  At least I got a kick out of it.

The levels.  At least this part of the game is designed better than the rest.  All of the environments are designed faithfully, aside from Felucia which just got all these new environmental additions which weren't even seen in the movie.  The only thing is there's no real room to fight or snipe things, and throwing a thermal det is useless unless your opposition is really that stupid to stay around it.

The controls are basically the same: Unresponsive, difficult as hell to manage, and never work when you want them to, especially with Jedi\Sith (for some reason both sides are mentioned as "Hero" characters) units.

Graphics can speak for theirselves.  They're good, if not a little bit too blurry.  The sounds, most if not all of them are carried over from Battlefront.  The Jedi's sounds are as corny as ever, none of the original actors did their lines.  Mace Windu sounds like a stereotyped black man "Fo' the Republic!" and everybody else just sounds... Terrible.  Then again, LucasArts did their job of not caring who did what in terms of voice acting, which is why Kyle Katarn's VA in Dark Forces II didn't get picked for Jedi Outcast.

In short... I expected great things, but all I got was a lot of the same, just with a flashier look.