$40 Well Spent!

You've seen the commercials, heard the hype, it all sounded okay. But then one day I headed to a friend house to go play some games, he so happened to have battlefront at his house. He let me play it and all I have to say is that the game was SO good that I literally left his house, went down to the store and bought it I was so impressed!

Easily compared to Battlefield 1942 (A very popular online game, massive multiplayer where players battle it out against each other) this game takes place in the Star Wars galaxy! Choose your planet, choose who you want to be, your weapons and best of all choose your vehicle! Never has Star Wars been so great! I found that I could walk around, snipe, easily form up team tactics against the computer or other players online and it never got repetitive because every planet was different!

Players can play almost anyone you can think about. You can be a Super Battle Droid (A mean robot with plenty of laser firepower), a Rebel Sniper, even climb into an AT-ST Walker! (those are the "chicken" walkers, giant robots that walk around that you see in the movie shooting lasers). And if you get to where you need to get somewhere fast, jump on a speedbike just like in the movie!

I found the gaming experience to be very engrossing, I found myself quite addicted to the game completely. It is very easy to move around, the game world looks absolutely amazing. How is it amazing you might say? For instance lets take the planet with the Gungans (Those are the guys who look like they have huge ears and the one that is called "Jar Jar" who has a horrible lisp... yeah) you can see the trees all around the world, they are extremely detailed to the point where you can see the branches and textures just look great! In the background you can see the world in awesome detail! Hills, valleys, and such awesome textures! See the sunset and the battlefield is even more dense in detail! You could even head to cloud city, floating up in the air, flying an X-Wing and see the sky in awesome detail. The detail of the ships, characters, weapons, special effects makes you feel like you're there doing it all.

The gameplay is outstanding. The controls are easy to work for any gamer, whether new or a rogue gamer. Of course if those don't fit you there is the option to change them of course. It's the standard first person layout view in the game but you can change that to 3rd person if you wish as well. So either way the game will suit you fine, they have it made where you can play it either way for those who enjoy feeling like they're in 1st person control or whether you want to be right there behind your character shooting in 3rd person. The weapon functions aren't hard to use or get use to, in fact you'll find once you get the hang of it you'll only get better.

Now one thing I didn't like was that piloting the ships is very difficult to get used to because you can't get too low or turn too sharp and even in 3rd person view in a ship it's still horribly difficult to navigate them and that makes it all the easier to crash them. Quick reflexes and time will make you experienced with that however. Piloting the tanks and vehicles isn't difficult at all, it's very easy to move and shoot at the same time, what makes it easier is that in some vehicles your friends can jump in and take control of MORE guns! That's right! Moving through the battlefield as a nasty tank fortress spouting off fire left and right makes it even that much more fun.

What about the storyline? Well my friends, this game is basically a 3 mode game. You can do the campaign, watch the movies and go through the storyline of star wars and be right there in the fighting field doing it all... You can go online and play your friends and foes in whatever level you want, same kind of fighting.... or you can play the 3rd mode, which is galaxy domination. Now the storyline for the campaign should be self explanatory, but for those who have never seen Star Wars and never played a Star Wars game it takes place in "A Galaxy far far away..." in space, on distant planets, weird creatures, aliens, and lots and lots of fighting. I won't ruin any of the storyline for you, but based on your success you will progress throughout each individual campaign for each dominating Star Wars "Clique" as we will call it. Whether you are fighting on Darth Vader's side in the Galactic Empire or fighting on the Republic's side they have their own storyline, a GREAT set of cinematics before each level and most of all it will last you a while.

Now I'd like to talk a little bit about the 3rd game mode, because multiplayer is basically just the campaign without the storyline, almost identical. But this 3rd mode "Galactic Conquest" I believe it is called is a little bit different than either one of them. What you do is you choose a planet to attack, you go there, and fight and based on whether you lose it or win it each planet has it's own special abilities that will do something. Some will jam radar sensors for your next battle, some will heal you continuously through battle and some will make it to where your enemies vehicles are damaged to an extent in battle from the beginning. What this mode does is allow you to strategically control the planets and slowly take over them all but the catch is that the computer gets it's own planets and you get yours, so these abilities can be used against you and you can use yours against them. Tricky eh? I thought it was pretty cool, now some of them have to be unlocked so I won't discuss all of the abilities but this game mode makes it extremely interesting when you haven't had the chance to really warm up to the game, it'll give you a good idea of what can and can't be done and will make you improvise when things are being used against you (like the enemy life keeps going up slowly after you shoot them for a while).

We've spoke plenty of graphics, I'd like to comment on the sound. Now of course we can all expect that the Star Wars theme would be in the game, and well, it is! What Star Wars game wouldn't be complete without the intro. But the surround sound will catch you every time! The game has a great sound engine, it will take full advantage of your computer if you have a nice sound card. Now I'm using a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum (By Creative) and had it set on 4.1 surround sound. By doing this it allowed me to be able to hear the entire environment of the game using EAX and Hardware Audio to the point where you could hear someone behind you, a speeder flying past you from left to right and fully to the extent where you will get where you are finely in tune with where things are at and feel that much more like you're in the game! But what if you don't have a good mid-point to high-end sound card? No worries! They've got you covered! You can still do software rendered audio which will still do the same thing, it won't be as in depth but they've made it so the whole crowd can enjoy it just as much no matter how fast and how far your computer will go!

Now just a few things to remember, hardware rendered audio can take up some serious resources on a computer so if you have a decently fast computer and not a lot of ram, etc, I would recommend that the hardware rendered audio, and eax be turned off, leave it to the software audio. It'll sound just fine and you'll notice a little bit of difference in performance.

Requirements. I think the one thing that blew me away when I first played this is the requirements that the game needs to play and how it played on the system I was playing it ON. First time I played it was at a friend's house as mentioned earlier with the following specs: 2.1ghz, 512mb RAM, standard audio, and a GForce ti4600. Now those are good specs, but not spectacular, the game was set to high detail and ram PERFECTLY SMOOTH! It didn't lag, it didn't jerk, it didn't blink, it was running just fine! The graphics looked impressive, it sounded great, felt great. The game was well designed and well optimized, this means that even if you had moderate specs you could bump the detail down and be playing it perfectly smooth.

Well that pretty much covers it. We've gone over the graphics, gameplay, sound, game modes, storyline. All I have to say is that this game is by far one of the best I've played all year and I am definitely looking forward to a sequel if there ever is one, in the mean time this one will DEFINITELY suffice for a LONG time and with the amazing output that Lucas Arts has put into making this game and the effort of making it so detailed I'm sure that some will agree with me in saying that this game is one of the best they've made in a long time.