STAR WARS™ Battlefront II (Classic, 2005)

As another childhood classic from my youth, it's no surprise that all these years later I still see people looking back on this game as one of the all-time greats. And while Star Wars Battlefront II certainly is a fun game, I've always sort of preferred the first game over it. Though it was something that always confused me when I was younger, the cancellation of the fabled Battlefront III starts to make more sense upon revisiting this sequel. While there are a lot of improvements over 2004's Battlefront, this game also takes some unfortunate step-backs of its own, which I will discuss. First and foremost, let me just say that the game is a total product of its time in the very best way possible. This game came out not long after Revenge Of The Sith hit our screens, and that movie's entire vibe is almost palpable in Battlefront II. Even just hearing a lot of its soundtrack play in the game makes me want to rewatch the movie. Pandemic were clever to expand on the 'heroes' feature in the first game, because now we get to take control of lots of iconic Star Wars characters ourselves. There's Obi-Wan, General Grievous, Darth Maul, Jango and Boba Fett, Han Solo, Aayla Secura, Darth Vader, and loads more. While the campaign is a bit more fleshed out than before and includes narration-heavy cutscenes as well as real objectives to follow, it's still not exactly all that great. Instant action is really the best part of the game (again) and introduces tons of cool new locations inspired by Revenge Of The Sith, like the maps set on Felucia, Mygeeto, Mustafar, Utapau, et cetera. Some maps from the first game are recycled here, yet some aren't as good we may remember, especially Geonosis. And where the heck is Bespin? Those were some pretty good maps, but that planet is completely absent in Battlefront II. Galactic conquest, just like before, sucks. A lot of people defend this mode, but the whole thing is just a huge pain in the backside at every turn. This time, it's more of a turn-based strategy game, something I utterly detest. The enemy can keep dropping in fleets seemingly anywhere and attempt to retake planets you've already conquered, which is extremely repetitive and irritating. You can defend your planets with a fleet of your own, but that means going through an utterly abysmal space battle, one of Battlefront II's big defining features. Yes, the space combat does have its moments and offers the chance to shoot down your opponents in epic starfighter battles set in the far reaches of space, but these conflicts get really boring when you have to keep going through them near-constantly in galactic conquest, resulting in me taking huge breaks between sessions because I was getting too mentally exhausted. It also doesn't help that steering the ships feels absolutely horrid with mouse control, even after I played around with the sensitivity settings. Unfortunately, with the inclusion of the new space battles, that means that air vehicles are all but removed entirely from the ground-based battles on the planets' surfaces. I think Hoth is the only map that retains vehicles that fly, but as you'll find out, it's just not as exciting as we remember it. As a matter of fact, the machinery we operate in Battlefront II has been totally nerfed, with weaker defences, poorer weapons (man, I really miss that awesome splash damage the tanks used to cause) and a general lack of empowerment. Further damaging Battlefront II's reputation is its strange abundance of technical and visual glitches. Even setting things up is slightly awkward; I have no idea why they couldn't reuse the same technology from the 2004 game, but I can tell you it took me a lot of fooling around in the settings in order to get everything just right in this supposedly newer sequel. I kid you not, even just by looking at its boring and grey-toned main menu, you'd think this was the older game of the two original Battlefront games. Anyway, like I said, there's a lot of weird visual bugs you can expect when playing this that are caused by mundane things like simply zooming in with a sniper rifle (on certain maps) or having your screen turn completely black if Discord's overlay is enabled. I have never seen any other game do this, and that does include the FIRST Battlefront, by the way. Dagobah, one of the more unique maps in the game, was all but completely ruined because the swampy water created this horrible 'pink-fog glitch' which made me need to quickly double-check that I wasn't currently high on L.S.D. There's a lot of other things that suck in comparison to the first game as well: the super battle droid appears to possess a slower rate of fire, you need to unlock special units after getting enough points (why is this a feature?) and the bots all behave very poorly, as though they're too distracted to properly fight you sometimes. I will say that the variety of new troops to pick from is pretty awesome, and using the engineer-exclusive shotgun is a fun weapon that improves on what we had before. One thing that has never failed to irritate me - even as a boy - is the fact that the clone troopers have all been re-dubbed with voice lines that make them sound like these completely stereotypically over-masculine macho-men. Um, did you guys forget that the first Battlefront ALREADY has the relevant voice lines for the clones, as delivered by the official voice actor, Temuera Morrison? I'll admit some of the dialogue for these new guys can be a bit iconic ('Just like the simulations!') but this still makes no sense. They're CLONES. It's in the name. Why would their voices be different now? You can't beat that kiwi accent they're known for. It's not like Morrison wasn't available either; he literally voices the narrator as well as Jango/Boba Fett. Now the clones all sound like steroid-abusing American grunts, and it's a puzzling and distracting change. I hate to continue this review with such negativity, but there is one last thing that must be addressed before I can start being a little nicer. The single player mode has a career tab that tracks your statistics, and this includes a medal system. These medals were almost certainly a last minute addition because nowhere - not even the manual - can be bothered explaining how they work. Basically, for a total of 64 times EACH, you need to pull off an impressive feat in order to permanently unlock the relevant awards. Some are as simple as getting a handful of sniper headshots, or earning pistol kills, but others are so bad they just make it obvious how untested this feature was. Demolition (using a rocket launcher on vehicle weak spots 4 times without dying) is a complete and total grind, just like the medal that requires you to slice into an enemy vehicle with your fusion cutter. That's 64 times remember. Talk about boring. Anyway, once you reach 'legendary' status for all the medals, you've pretty much completed the single player mode and you'll start every match with a ton of handy advantages. I will say that, in spite of my constant criticisms, Battlefront II does stand the test of time and is truly an excellent Star Wars game worth experiencing, especially in comparison to the newer E.A remakes that want to drain your wallet more than anything else. Is the game perfect? Nope. The 2004 release carries the day, at least in my opinion, but that doesn't make Battlefront II bad at all. The soundtrack is a lot more apparent than before and I simply can't forget to note the amazing scope of detail found in a lot of the maps. There's some really cool locations to explore too, such as the Death Star, Jabba's palace and Tantive IV. Multiplayer still has some people playing, but in my opinion these games have always been more fun offline with the bots. Just don't choose to play on elite difficulty...

I am a 4/mo baby, probably one of the youngest people playing this game. I am an only child to my parents, who are both in their 30s now. My dad got this game for Christmas from his brother, so we installed it on his computer and he started playing. By the end of the week he had 24 hours on this game. This was horrible for me, as it was already hard for me to find ways to spend time with my dad, as he is always out with his friends or just, watching Fox News. So i decided to make a Steam account and get this game to see if I could maybe play alongside him . loaded into the game, made my character and started playing but I was stuck on what you were supposed to do. I asked my dad for help and he helped me. Loved it as it was the best time had spent with my dad since my mom had died. This game has ever since brought me and my dad closer again and now we actually spend time together outside the house together as well. This game reminded me that there's fun to be had in everything, and I cant wait to make future memories with my dad.

Best Star Wars shooter of all time. The newer versions are poor attempts at recreating this magic.

The best star wars game ever, there I said it. I may be a bit biased because I've been playing the game for 20 years but in my opinion its one of the greatest games of all time. The modding community is also incredible for such an old game.

it's a classic game with tons of content to enjoy vs. the one from EA with not that much and pay to win junk in it

Same classic game from the Xbox original days, with fan-made custom maps as a bonus.

If nostalgia were opiates, this'd be fentanyl

WATCH THOSE WRIST ROCKETS

[h1] Один из лучших тактических экшен-шутеров по Star Wars. [/h1] Одна из первых моих игр в жизни, так что трудно её ругать за что-то.

Uh, well... it's a pretty good game. Playing this game in 2026, it really feels like something from another era, in the sense that this is a very full-featured video game. We got a singleplayer campaign, a singleplayer, uh, Dark Crusade type node-based 'Galactic Conquest' gametype? We got, 'Instant Action' (now isn't THAT a blast from the past) and there's off course the multiplayer component. Most games these days, it feels like, only have one gamemode and that's multiplayer, or it only has singleplayer, and that's that. Do one thing well, so to speak. Anyway, so what actually is this? It's like a Battlefield where you control a man, or you can hop in a vehicle and do the vehicle for a while. That's basically it. You got several different kits you can play as when a man, and they all do different things. Like, you have man that shoots gun, or man that shoots rocket launcher, or man that shoots a shotgun. This game interestingly had I suppose some sort of similar idea to Far Cry, in that engineers, who carry shotguns, need to have some reason to interact with objects and do some sort of job. And that's why they can build structures, mostly turrets, from time to time. The structure basically exists on the ground and you just LMB with your engineer tool until it exists. Similarly, when repairing stuff, if it is a completely broken turret or whatever, you basically have to rebuild it from the ground up which takes forever. The game also doesn't seem to have any real concept of like, 'our' turrets or 'their' turrets and you can seemingly interact with any health robot or ammo robot (the venerable 'gonk' droid in Battlefront 2 refills your ammo) and there's no penalties or anything, even if you're in the enemy base. So this is really a pretty janky game. Overall, I didn't mind that though, since they manage to do a lot with this game, on what feels like certainly a small budget. The music is worth noting because I noticed at some point they do what many other Star Wars licensed games did, which is just take music from the movies, and just throw it in the game without really any consideration for when it should play, or which track should play - just throw it all in there. So it's very surreal at times, hearing the heroic music from when Luke swings across a void in the Death Star with Leia, while you're playing as an Imperial Stormtrooper. The game has a reasonably strong singleplayer component, the game has a campaign which has, in my opinion, a pretty poor difficulty ramp. Every mission is kind of all over the place in how much it challenges you, and sometimes you'll just be likeh meh, this is easy and just speedrun to the end, and sometimes you'll just get destroyed. Because, the game works on a lives system, like tickets in Battlefield, where your soldiers have so many reinforcements and when that runs out, you can't respawn anymore. Except, in the campaign the enemy gets INFINITE respawns, and you get finite. This puts you on, at times, a very severe time limit. You can't seemingly control your allies in any reasonable way, since they're AI and they just do whatever, and they very often just kind of get murdered. While there aren't too many 'campaign enemies' like in some games, there are a few levels, and one notable one, where the enemy just gets help from anomalous units that are kind of overpowered. And sometimes the game kind of just spams too many of one enemy type, or at least it feels that way. Rebel snipers are an absolute curse, since they have hitscan weapons and do 80% of your life most of the time in one shot. It's not fun. There's also the Knightfall mission, wherein you kill a bunch of Jedi. Jedi are a pain to kill since it's kind of random whether they choose to block your blaster shots, or not. When they 'lock on' to you as well, they basically will not stop until they have walked on top of you and lightsaber'd you to death. This sucks pretty bad, and thanks to a part of the mission where you have to 'defend these objects' from like a dozen Jedi, or else you instantly game over, it's probably the worst mission in the game. Surprisingly, Battlefront 2 is a blend of Star Wars prequels era scenarios, as well as 'original trilogy' scenarios. The finale of the game is the Hoth battle, and it begins basically with the first battle of the clone wars, on Geonosis. So you've got, the rebellion, the empire, the separatists, and... the clone troopers, all playable in this game. Neat. The game kind of tries to have a story? I don't know if it's totally effective, but if you like 'military fiction' it basically reads like a diary of 'some guy' you never know the name of, chronicling the events that these clone troopers went through, the 501st. I have never really liked the clone trooper > stormtrooper thing, because the way it always seemed to me, is that the Empire probably hired on just regular people. Of course, I could buy there might be some clone troopers left over, but I always assumed they'd have pretty short lifespans overall. You're making a bunch of dudes to fight in a war and you don't really probably expect them to live through the end of the war or care about them, since they're clones, they are deliberately expendable. So why wouldn't there be some kind of in-built kill timer in them basically? You also don't probably want or need clone soldiers developing all of the problems that soldiers actually have to deal with in real life, like, permanent disabilities or maladies. Why would you bother preserving some 40 year old (which is approximately how old many of the 501st would be by the end of this game) when you could just clone new 20 year old dudes who are more able and more expendable? Anyway, to get away from all that, the story is reasonably effective. It's hard to call it like a 'real' story since it's mostly just some dialogue over gameplay footage, between each mission. It at least helps give some context for each mission, so that's nice. It's enough. So yeah, uh, it's a Battlefield type shooter and it's pretty fun. It'd probably be even more fun if the multiplayer was a little more active (I did see one nearly full server in the server browser so that's cool) but as it stands, the singleplayer component is pretty good, and the game runs surprisingly well. I had zero crashes, which is impressive for a game of this age, and with this level of jank.