Star Wars: Battlefront II is a weird hybrid of a game that combines Real Time Strategy with First Person Shooter (henceforth known as RTS and FPS) elements. It’s quite a bold idea (obviously one that worked well enough in the first game, which I’ve never played, to warrant a sequel) , but to me it didn’t quite work.
Developed by Pandemic and released by LucasArts, Battlefront II has a few problems that might mean you have to tweak it to get it to work. I’m not too sure about Vista compatibility (the OS didn’t seem to be the problem when I finally got it to run), but there are definite issues with the GeForce 6 and 7 series cards, and with dual core CPUs. Since I have a GeForce 7500LE running Vista on a dual core processor, I seem to have managed to get all the possible problems all at once! The CPU problem (potentially fixed with the patch you can find on the LucasArts site) can sometimes be solved by setting the CPU affinity to just use one core; though for me the problem actually seemed to be my graphics card. The game loaded fine but whenever you tried to actually start a game it crashed. There was no problem once I set the resolution down to 1024x768; therefore if you have problems with the game after installing it, I would suggest you try this first as it’s the easiest route to go down.
Anyway, presuming you can get the game to actually work, you have several options; start training, start the main single-player game (which includes the training unless you skip it), start another complete scenario (Galactic Conquest) or start a multiplayer game. I did consider trying out the multiplayer (which I normally avoid because I probably wouldn’t have enough time to get really involved), but after playing the game for a while decided against it as I realised it probably wouldn’t by much more fun than the single-player unless I got a group of people I know to play against. I don’t know anyone else who has the game at the moment, so I passed on that one.
On starting the single-player game however, after a fairly brief and generally useful training mission, you get stuck into the game itself. Prefacing each mission is a diary entry of the trooper you’re playing followed by a short movie sequence. The diary entries are okay, the movies have a weird unreal quality about them that I think’s intentional but somehow off-putting. They are also too short to really enjoy watching them. The missions themselves, as well as the game play, are moderately challenging but to be honest I just didn’t find them all that interesting or enjoyable. To me the best thing about the game is that it gives you a lot of extra back story to events in the movies, lets you see another side of the action (for instance, while Obi-Wan and Anakin were doing their thing in the space battle, the other troops had their own objectives to fulfil in order to support the Jedi operation). There is also a lot of filling in between events in the movies. Telling it from the point of view of a lowly foot soldier (albeit one in a highly regarded team) was interesting, taking you away from the main thrust of the story told in the films.
The game play mechanics work okay, I found them slightly unwieldy at times but not to the extent that it made things impossible. There is a wide range of things you can do in the game - taking control of many different types of soldier (all generating from command posts, the capture of which is vital to the game) as well as Jedi, controlling various land vehicles and space ships, was good. However with the fun factor missing and a couple of bugs (in some places it’s impossible to take over a command post despite doing everything you’re supposed to in order to accomplish that) took away the longevity. The different soldiers etc you can control are quite different, but there is absolutely no scope for upgrading your abilities apart from being able to unlock new soldier types after a certain number of points have been gained.
The on land FPS sections get tedious quite quickly, and while the space battles seem more fun at first, they also seem more pointless - it’s really just a case of staying alive long enough to drop off at your target destination and go back into FPS mode. Also there appeared to be very little actual strategy in the game - maybe I didn’t get far enough into it, or perhaps it comes in with the multiplayer games, but in the end I lost patience with Battlefront II; to me it’s basically an uninspiring FPS with hardly any elements of RTS to make things more interesting. The idea of merging the two genres is an interesting one, but here I don’t feel that it’s particularly well accomplished.
The graphics are okay, quite impressive in the space battles but fairly bland on the ground. The music and effects sound good in the menus, intros and movies, but for some reason I can’t fathom there is none in-game. There is certainly supposed to be - perhaps if anyone reading this has had the same problem and overcome it, they can leave a comment telling me how! This lack of in-game sound is almost certainly an element in its failure to produce much in the way of atmosphere and excitement.
Overall I was disappointed with
Star Wars: Battlefront II. Even with the problems mentioned already being completely sorted out, the game would still suffer from the same problem - it just isn’t fun.
I don’t know why, but this was the first game I’ve ever seen with a movie-style age rating instead of the usual ones - Battlefront 2 is rated PG for mild violence.
Minimum System Requirements
CPU: 1.4GHz
OS: 2000 / XP (as mentioned, it seems happy with Vista)
RAM: 256Mb
Graphics card: 64Mb 3D card with vertex and pixel shader support
DirectX; 9.0c
HDD space: 4.3Gb
For multiplayer, a fast internet connection is required. As far as I can see there is no LAN support for multiplayer.
Supported graphics cards:
ATI Radion 8500, 9xxx series, X300/X600/X700/X800/X850 series
nVidia GeForce 3,4,FX,6,7 series (not GeForce 4 MX series)
Star Wars Links
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Star Wars Computer Games
Knights of the Old Republic
Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords
Jedi Academy
LEGO Star Wars
LEGO Star Wars 2: The Original Trilogy
Star Wars Films
Revenge of the Sith (Episode III)
A New Hope (Episode IV)
The Empire Strikes Back (Episode V)
Return of the Jedi (Episode VI)
The Clone Wars: Volume I
The Clone Wars: Volume II
