So this game exists. Apparently it still works but it's super dead. These were the folks who wanted to remake Battlefront 3 about 10 years ago, and when that didn't work for obvious reasons like openly marketing how you're making a Star Wars game while having barely anything to show for it and EA has an exclusivity deal that was set to expire last year as of writing, turns out they didn't have much else to do.
Even with an "original" ip that looks like it came out of Crackdown 3, a gameloft game for an iPad, or almost any generic indie sc-fi game. They made a couple of tech demos apparently, although this version removed most of the larger maps. This is the thing that almost anyone who's excited for a Battlefront 3 doesn't understand, the game fell apart because of the ground to space mechanic and its ambitions made it die a painful death like Icarus flying too close to the sun.
Going from the ground into outer space sounds cool on paper, but if you played the leaked builds, it really detracts from the gameplay because the big ships never actually enhanced the gameplay, or added any real new dynamics. They only acted as another spawn point that in all reality could have just been cut out and you would be able to make much better ground maps with dog fighting instead.
Imagine how cool it would be to have massive air and ground battles and you can still keep the ground to space, but if you removed the big ships, or maybe made it a second phase like Battlefield 2142 or Titanfall's evacuations at the end of the match, it would have worked better that way. I hate EA's Battlefront games, but they got that right for their own supremacy mode. So unless a big name developer is going to spend 15 years making an open world Star Wars Battlefront, this idea is too ambitious and really doesn't work as its presented. So replicating that also isn't advisable considering this team was maybe 7 people who had some spare time on occasion.
So seeing how they had years of development, but not very much time or money, how did they do? Well, this game spawned me in as a t-posing default Unreal 4 dummy into a team deathmatch where very generic looking monkey, crab, and lizard men fought generic power rangers with laser guns that actually went "pew pew pew." How original. The problem I have is they managed to also repeat that game's mistakes too, which is stupid but I expected that.
Battlefront 3 had gone in a direction where the gameplay was very good for close quarters like gears of war, and they made the ground very much that, which made its ground battles a little messy but good. GiT seems to have actually fixed up the messy feel to the game where characters would get locked in directions while moving fast, and almost jam up when swapping guns. So thankfully that's ok, but the AI is worse than EA's skirmish mode in 2015, so that's not good. These ai are super easy to cheese, they jam constantly, get stuck, and can't even perform basic objectives like capturing command posts but aren't bad shots so that's something. Meanwhile EA in 2015 made walker assault work just fine and AI soldiers could play on both sides in 8 big maps. Obviously the originals from 2004 and 2005 are the best, but it's not looking good for Frontwire.
GiT on the other hand has 2 maps in this build, and both of them are very rough. So the first one is hard to explain because I had no idea what it was trying to be. It was a small map that looked like it wanted to be a dark and dingy factory or warehouse of some kind, but had research equipment and big banner ads in the spawns with bright neon colors and black floors with white walls that were dirty. It was like they smashed 3 maps into one and it played well, but looked awful, unlike the store page here which makes it look more like a dark factory with cinematic smoke and heavy industrial pipes. This map looked unfinished.
The second map was a flooded and overgrown junkyard from my best guess, I think they were trying to make something akin to Raxus Prime from Star Wars the Force Unleashed, although that's not exactly convincing me when you have these big neon ads in the background again and a weird transparent cube around the entire map during a bright and sunny day.
It was like they got most of the dirty stuff right, but then decided to smear it in bright colors so it wouldn't look like Star Wars anymore, but they ended up making everything look like Coruscant's city ads and it made no sense. If they toned down the neon everywhere and fixed up these maps, they could have been on to something. Star Wars looked great because everything was beat up and worn, which made it look like it had history. But then they dropped the ball and it popped.
Battlefront as a series has been at its best when maps are medium or small sized, not that anyone wants to admit it, but I think LucasArts was right trying to make a game more like Call of Duty than Battlefield with the cancelled First Assault. Bigger isn't better, and I think people are starting to realize that a bigger game means sacrifices elsewhere that are too big to ignore. If you want my recommendation for a game that does Battlefront better, PvZ Garden Warfare 1&2. It's almost everything you would want from a successor to a kid's game about pretend turf wars. New classes with tons of subclass variants, progression, fun rewards, campaign, coop, survival, big scale battles, they even have lots of customization and lasers too.
Frontwire failed to finish this game and burnt themselves out, but seeing how they went other places and made careers of this, at least it was worth something. Neat idea, but since it was free, hey at least it was harmless. Maybe you'll get a kick out of it, but there's maybe 30 minutes of a game here so it's really not worth wasting more time downloading it than you will playing it. Can't recommend.
