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and choke points. It’s easy to get
sucked into 10-person battles and
feel a sense of larger scale.
Wander a bit, though, and you’ll
soon realise otherwise. These maps
are, as we said, enormous, yet
large parts of them is empty. Leave
wherever the latest pitched battle is
occurring and you’ll find that no-one
else is around. Nobody explores
the side corridors and no fighting
takes place 100m behind you. It’s all
focused on the choke point, because
DICE has led players right to it.
We suspect this is why there’s no
Conquest mode. Instead, Battlefront
has Supremacy, which is similar
on the surface, but plays out in
a fundamentally different way.
Conquest allows for the freeform
capture of a certain number
of objectives. Supremacy has
five objectives, but at any given
time your team will attempt to
capture one and defend another,
proceeding in a linear fashion.
This keeps the battles tight and
centred around certain areas, but it
makes us wish DICE had borrowed
from its EA cohort Respawn. We
don’t think Titanfall’s bots were a
great solution, but at least they
fleshed out the action.
The result is that Battlefront 2015
feels both bigger and smaller than
the 10-year-old Battlefront II. Sure,
put the two next to each other and
the difference in graphics is clear. A
decade ago, Battlefront II’s sense of
scale is what tricked us into feeling
we were living Star Wars. DICE gets
pretty close to the same feeling with
some spectacular graphics, but it’s
not enough. Not for us, anyway. It’s
definitely not where we expected
we’d be in 2015.
Single player
There are also two single-player/
co-op modes. One is a reskinned
Horde option, fighting off waves of
enemies. The other is basically the
same thing except the waves are
just a stream of troops and you’re
aiming to kill a certain amount. We
don’t think either is interesting,
though it will let you use all weapons
immediately, no unlocks necessary.
We played through each mode once
and then went back to multiplayer.
Verdict
It’s admittedly hard to divorce our
opinions of Battlefront from our
expectations – both in regards to
the game’s predecessors and DICE’s
other work. We’ve tried to avoid too
many comparisons to Battlefront II
here, but we’ve waited a decade for
this game and after 10 years this is
not only missing many of the modes
and features that seemed destined
for Pandemic’s original stab at a
Battlefront III, but also much of
what we liked about Battlefront II.
We’ve also tried to avoid harping
too much on ‘problems’ that are
endemic to the source material. For
instance, we’re still not fans of the
fact the guns in Battlefront have
a spread instead of recoil, and we
don’t like the feel. That, however,
is what laser rifles (at least in Star
Wars) do, and DICE couldn’t change
this even if it wanted to, and we’ve
come to accept it for what it is.
But we think the game falls into
a weird place. It’s not Battlefront III
enough for the diehard fans, and
it’s not deep enough (at least, not
without spending another £40 and
waiting on a long dribble of content)
for us to believe the game has
staying power. It is, however, friendly
enough for beginners that it may
(temporarily) appeal to the masses
of Star Wars fans that have never
touched its predecessor or a modern
shooter, but want to pick up a fun
video game after seeing The Force
Awakens. J Hayden Dingman
February 2016 www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews 67