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.
