Star Wars Battlefront 2 – Review (Xbox One)

The controversy surrounding Battlefront 2 will be familiar to anyone who follows video games in nearly any capacity. A controversy that reached a pinnacle when a post from EA became the most downvoted post in reddit history.

For anyone unfamiliar with the fiasco, the party foul EA committed was all focused on their progression system for the multiplayer component of the game – primarily the loot box integration. It’s a shame that a review for a game has to start in this manner, but the public outcry has forced our hand on this one. Before we get to the details of that though, let’s dive right in to the long-awaited campaign that was absent from Dice and EA’s first attempt.

Campaign

For a game called Battlefront, the developers made an interesting decision to begin the campaign with the main character imprisoned. The first thing you do as the player is control a droid, who is only referred to as “droid” throughout the game, as it navigates through air ducts in order to help free Iden Versio from her captivity. From there, things only continue to go downhill. The dialogue is so bad that by the end of the first mission you will be tired of her telling the droid to splice everything.

Throughout the first few missions you follow Iden and Inferno Squad as they carry out Emperor Palpatine’s last order after his death. There are a mixture of land and space battles, both of which tend to overstay their welcome, as well as hero missions. Somehow the hero missions have found a way to be the least exciting sections of the lackluster campaign. The campaign feels like a bunch of multiplayer ideas smashed together with a shell of a story to lead you along.

The load times are abysmal and the technical glitches help to hinder the experience. At one point, we would continue to respawn in the sky just floating along as if parachuting to the planet without ever landing. After multiple attempts to fix this by restarting the checkpoint, we had to shut down the console and start over. While this fixed the bug, it was incredibly annoying.

The story was completely unrewarding and ended in a way that will make you question if it was actually over or not. Upon completing the campaign, you can jump into multiplayer and continue the adventures of Iden, as long as you decide to use your hard earned credits to unlock her as a hero in multiplayer.

Multiplayer

The core of the multiplayer experience is a ton of fun. Every Star Wars fan will love experiencing all-out war on familiar battle fields. Some of the new maps really shine, especially those from the prequel trilogy. With maps from all three trilogies present, there are locations that will appeal to any fan of the saga.

There is basically no customization to your character’s appearance. You are able to choose between four different classes each time you respawn, as well as various heroes as you earn points in battle. The more points you earn, the greater the hero that you can unlock.

This brings us to the area the game really gets muddled. In order to be able to use a hero in battle you must first have that hero unlocked. Unlocking these heroes requires in-game credits. To unlock the most powerful heroes (Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker) you will need to have accumulated 15,000 credits. This sounds like a lot when you only receive maybe 200-250 credits per match, doesn’t it? Well, that figure is down seventy five percent from the originally slated 60,000 credits it was supposed to cost to unlock them. The time it would have taken to unlock the heroes at that rate would have been astronomical. At 15,000 credits they are now more easily attainable. However, in order to unlock them, you will need to save your credits instead of using them to open loot boxes containing star cards and other rewards.

What is a star card, you say? Glad you asked. Think of them as Battlefront’s answer to Call of Duty’s perk system. Only instead of unlocking them by skillfully completing challenges, you unlock them by randomly opening loot boxes that you buy with credits earned from playing the game. There is no rhyme or reason as to what you may get in these boxes. The only thing you know is that by opening them you will receive cards that can be equipped to your trooper, giving you an in-game advantage over your enemies. By saving up and buying heroes, you forfeit the ability to purchase these boxes and your trooper could be significantly weaker because of it.

During the course of this review, these boxes could be purchased with real world money as well, but before the official launch and review embargo, EA decided to suspend the micro-transactions for the time being. They did say they would return – we just aren’t sure when or how they will come back. While that was the outcry from the beginning, the micro-transactions didn’t really help the player in the way that most people originally thought that they would. You cannot buy heroes in the loot boxes so you still must earn in-game credits to unlock them. But you could buy loot boxes giving you star cards thus enabling you to save your credits towards heroes.

While it is much nicer to be able to play as a hero when you earn the credits in a match to use your unlocked hero, it’s a shame it takes so long to unlock them. Though this is still a better way to play as a hero than the first game, which made you find a random icon on the battle field and hope you got there first.

This progression system fails on every level. You can earn credits during the campaign and arcade mode as well, but in arcade mode you are capped at how many you can earn during a certain time period and can often find yourself playing for no credits at all. It’s a shame that playing with a friend in the same room with bots can be considered a waste of time, but in a game that relies so heavily on earning credits to stay relevant, that’s exactly what it is.

It’s a shame that EA and Dice missed the mark so badly on what could have been a sure fire hit. A lackluster campaign ended up hurting the overall package instead of helping it, and the multiplayer progression system is just insultingly bad.

Recommendation: It’s hard to recommend this game to anyone but hardcore Star Wars fans, of which we at Handsome Phantom are. It makes it even more depressing for us to have to talk so poorly about a franchise we hold so dear. The single player campaign suffers from such poor writing and boring set pieces that it definitely isn’t worth the price of admission. There is fun to be had in the multiplayer, but you have to put the time in that it requires to stay relevant or be okay with dying more than you would like from time to time.