See I quite liked the beleaguered Battlefront. I know it had a gaping wound in it where the single-player campaign should have been, but I spent an unholy amount of hours in online skirmishes being part of Rebel assaults, Imperial defences and all points in between.
Perhaps that’s inherent in the theme; Star Wars fandom can so easily skew one’s opinion, although it swings violently both ways (particularly on the subject of Episodes I-III).
SWB2 is a stand-alone Star Wars story, and it’s canon – this fact is important and leg-shakingly exciting for a fan. Starting towards the end of Return of the Jedi, hard-nosed Imperial Special Forces firebrand Iden Versio watches the Death Star light up the sky in its destruction as her squad picks off Rebel scum on the service of Endor’s Sanctuary Moon.
Not an organisation to cry over spilt Emperor, the remnants of Versio’s upper management colleagues are keen to carry out old prune-face’s last orders, handily recorded before Senor Vader lobbed his master down a metal crevasse.
So off you pop with your evil chums to sort out the disorder for which the rebels are responsible.
I’ve been around enough first and third-person shooters (for this can be both) over the years to know when one is short on features and, make no mistake, the options available to Iden pale when compared with other marquee shooter titles.
And this may irritate the genre purist.
But I’m not one of those. I’m a Star Wars fan and a gamer, and SWB2 massages my Star Wars gland very nicely indeed... for the four-and-a-half hours that it took me to finish the story.
Gutted.
No single-player story should hit the wall – open-ended that it is – in less than 10 hours, and the fact it’s Star Wars is doubly distressing. There’d better be a few more hours’ single-player DLC on the way.
There are also irritations with how the multi-player levelling up is arranged, and the randomised loot crate system is not an acceptable way to earn upgrades.
But when you’re in the thick of a dogfight over or a battle in those familiar settings, I can forgive a lot.
Let’s never fight again…
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