Star Wars and video games are like bread and butter. Stemming from dusty arcade cabinets 32 years ago, the cherished franchise began to allow their fans to take part in the adventure. Now in 2015, fans can create their own adventures in the newly-released Star Wars Battlefront.
In contrast to the single-player components of yore, Battlefront now focuses on an online multiplayer experience ranging from 8 player small scale skirmishes to massive, 40-man battlefields. Unlike most EA games, Battlefront has had almost no server errors, making the game much less broken at launch. Utilizing the comparatively seamless matchmaking EA has been known for, you are placed in a server as quickly as possible, and the connection is more or less stable the whole way through. At launch, Battlefront was released with nine multiplayer game modes, four splitscreen offline modes and a lone single-player component. The maps are lush and detailed, spanning across four different planets with drastically different environments. EA and Dice are no slouch design-wise: the really immersive and beautiful scenery and superb sound drops the player in an enchanted Star Wars fantasy. The studio nailed the graphics, rendering that small puddle on Endor to the iconic AT-AT Walker on Hoth with equal care. The detailed graphics and the immersive fantasy has a certain quantifiable appeal.
The game, in all its glory, is still flawed. With the widely different yet similar multiplayer game styles, the game is lively — for the first week. The thrill of piloting an X-Wing or charging the shield generator on Hoth is undeniable, but the repetitive nature and lack of content causes the game to start to lose its flare rather quickly. This is a main issue for the future of Battlefront because of all the other games released this season, considering the plethora of content found in, say, Fallout 4 and Rainbow Six: Siege . Besides the sense of inevitable boredom that the games brings, it is overall very well made for what it is, and its impeccable design make it one of EA’s best released games in recent years.
7/10
