Star Wars Battlefront II
Developer Criterion, DICE, EA Motive Publisher EA Format PC, PS4, Xbox One (tested) Release Out now
PC, PS4, Xbox One
Well, we suppose it was never going to last. We came away from E3 having tried to take Star Wars Battlefront II’s marketing pitch at face value, and failing to buy the premise. How could we possibly be expected to spend the duration of its story campaign empathising with a card-carrying member of the Empire – the daughter of an Admiral, no less! – mowing down the light side of the Force as we helped evil incarnate conquer the galaxy? The answer, predictably, is that you don’t. The surprise is in just how quickly, after all that marketing spend, the Battlefront II writing team shows its hand. And even after the bait and switch is complete, we still don’t buy it, albeit for different reasons.
The tipping point for protagonist Iden Versio comes barely an hour into Battlefront II’s six-hour campaign, when the nascent New Order decides to destroy what’s left of the Empire after another loss to the Rebels in Return Of The Jedi. She’s sent to her home planet to retrieve a senior member of the fleet, and does so with consummate professionalism. However, her orders did not permit her to rescue anyone else from certain death, and at this she bristles. To the point of treason, even. And so, within a heartbeat she is Iden Versio, Rebel Commander, palling around the galaxy with the great and good of the Rebellion. On the Death Star she’d have seen planets destroyed; millions of voices crying out in terror and all that. She’d have surely been aware that her boss was a hideous space racist – and that many of the people she fought alongside were too. But no, all that’s fine. Wait. You’re going to leave these poor people to die? Our people? That’s just not cricket. I’m off.
Perhaps we are overthinking it. This is, in many ways, a game that gets worse the more you think about it, but we’ll get to the multiplayer stuff later. With our objections to its premise put aside, there’s a lot of enjoyment to be had out of Battlefront II’s campaign, almost all of which comes from its source material and EA’s loving, slavish adherence to it. The story picks up shortly before the destruction of the second Death Star, and charts the rise of The New Order from the ashes of the Empire. It’s a fine choice of time period, familiar but not overplayed, and one that gives EA Motive, the studio charged with producing the campaign in this three-studio project, licence to pepper the action with cameos from leading Star Wars lights – with you at the controls.
Some fare better than others. Leia Organa’s appearance is a finely handled running battle through the streets of a Rebel-held city; Luke Skywalker’s has him running around a cave slashing awkwardly at bugs the size of footballs. Quality varies, then, but they all help break up the pace, and are the driving force of a work of extreme fan service. At every turn, whatever you’re doing, there will be something that reminds you of a moment in one of the (good) films, and that is no accident.
It’s critical, too. This game’s predecessor, released in 2015, was put together with similar reverence for the source material, but was widely criticised for the lack of meat on its bones. It was, some throwaway co-op missions aside, a purely online-multiplayer game. Keen to avoid a repeat of that – and perhaps with one eye on the expiration in a few years of its licensing deal with Star Wars owner Disney – EA has filled Battlefront II with stuff. And the campaign will, naturally, be most players’ first port of call. So, as Versio hops around the galaxy to bring the New Order to its knees, you are subtly being taught how to play the multiplayer component which, its makers hope, will keep you busy for a couple-of-hundred hours after the campaign credits have rolled. You’ll pilot X-Wings and TIE Fighters, AT-ATs and AT-STs; you’ll have a good play with the heroes and villains who serve as killstreaks in the multiplayer component. Mission loadouts are fixed, ensuring you get a feel for different classes of weapon. It’s smart stuff, showing just how much variety there is in the online mode’s 40-person pitched battles. And it’s essential since, if you take it all away, you see Motive doesn’t have much else up its sleeve. This is Blockbuster Shooter Design 101: a series of assaults and defences, turrets and little stealth sections. It’s rote and rudimentary, but elevated by the Star Wars IP and all that comes with it. That’s the good news. After the credits have rolled, lone players will likely head to what’s rather misleadingly called Arcade mode, but they won’t stay long. It’s a suite of 16 missions – eight each for the light and dark sides of the Force – in which you control iconic characters in similarly famous locations. That sounds great, but the reality is anything but: you run around gormlessly, looking for randomly spawning, braindead AI enemies to dispatch before a timer expires, a three-second top-up awarded for each kill. There are three tiers of each mission, the harder ones reducing the time limit, buffing the bad guys and applying various modifiers, which turns something boring and easy into something boring and infuriating. And when you see the menu entry advising you that you’ve hit your daily limit for the mode’s currency rewards, it feels like EA is holding its hands up. Yes, yes, we know. We’re sorry. Look, go off and do something else, will you?
This brings us to the meat of the thing, the multiplayer, where EA’s intent for you to spend a chunk of your precious free time for the next two years could hardly be made more clear. And it’s difficult to see how it could possibly have got it more wrong. This is a game that has been cynically structured to drive player engagement across dozens, if not hundreds of hours,
With our objections to its premise put aside, there’s a lot of enjoyment to be had out of Battlefront II’s campaign
and to take that engagement and aggressively monetise the living heck out of it.
For the benefit of the half-dozen of you who really do live under a rock, here are the basics of Battlefront
II’s progression problem. While there is a levelling system, it’s really just there for show, its only significance being to wall off a crafting system until much later on. Everything else you’d expect from an online game’s progression curve is instead driven by loot crates, bought either using a premium, paid-for currency (which was disabled on the eve of launch, but will surely be back) or an in-game equivalent that you acquire at a glacial pace. It will take even a handy player around ten matches of Galactic Assault, the game’s star multiplayer attraction, to afford a ‘Trooper’ crate, which gives out a randomised selection of currency, crafting parts, emotes and skins – and, hopefully, new Star Card abilities for the bog-standard infantry you control for most of a match. Challenges can speed that up, but not by much, as can a daily login crate (typically containing 75 credits; Trooper crates cost over 4,000).
Then there are the heroes, some of which are unlocked from the start, but many of which must be bought with credits. While EA may have lowered the ludicrous initial cost by 75 per cent (Vader and Skywalker reduced from 60,000 credits to 15,000) after a quite tremendous online outcry, you’re still looking at hours of play before you can unlock just one of the heroes and villains you probably bought the game for. Sadly, saving up means denying yourself any loot boxes for a while, and so making life more difficult for yourself while you try to work towards a faraway financial target without being able to tart up your favourite class with Star Card perks. The abilities they afford are straight upgrades, buffing with no trade-off, putting the haves and the have-nots in very different positions on the power curve. There is only one way out: pony up some real-world cash for a stack of loot crates, and hope for the best. It’s awful stuff, and a landmark. It’s comfortably the worst implementation of a loot system we’ve seen in a full-price game – and we thought we’d seen some stinkers. It is the most miserly structure of the grubbiest of free-to-play games, plastered cynically over a full-priced product. It is a game of the most overt fan service that treats those very fans with utter disdain, binding them to a progression system that is entirely defined by randomisation and grinding with which they have no alternative but to engage if they want to progress and compete, unless they get their wallets out.
It is especially abhorrent that this should happen in a game with almost unrivalled massmarket appeal. It takes a seasoned player to know when they are being played, and the Star Wars fan who buys this game on name alone is in for one hell of a nasty shock – and potentially a very expensive one. After the barebones 2015 Battlefront, on paper this promised to be, finally, the big-budget Star Wars game of our dreams. Yet in reality it is not a new hope; it is a new low. No doubt EA and its trio of development studios will fix this mess eventually, but the fact they deemed it fit for purpose in the first place is unavoidable, and damning in the extreme. Whatever happens next, we’re afraid we don’t patch review scores.