Game Design

Battlefront is a game where you can play as a soldier in all of the major battles throughout the Star Wars films. The concept immediately grabbed my attention and I bought the game.

First of all lets get to the good stuff. The controls are fairly good, you can crouch, crawl and roll out of the way of oncoming fire and the camera view is 1st and 3rd person interchangeable. You can use three weapons that you carry with you, a rapid fire weapon that runs on limited ammo, a less powerful pistol that recharges after each shot, and electric or exploding grenades. You have wide range of vehicles such as AT-AT walkers, X-Wing fighter jets and Tie Fighters. I’d list the rest but I can’t find the names. An additional sniping and over-the-shoulder view is optional, whichever one you prefer. A very good thing to have in this game is a jedi hero on your side. Seriously, nothing can kill them except for knocking them off a cliff, blowing them up with grenades, or running them over. Sometimes when you’re injured or running low on ammo, a pilot will throw you a bacta capsule or ammo, which is good because you’ll be needing it.

Now I have to get to the bad meat of the game. It has a lot of balancing issues. Sometimes battles are so impossibly hard that the only way to win is to have difficulty on easy, assign a jedi hero and to hop into a vehicle and blast everything in sight. While at other times, battles are so easy that you can just fool around the whole time, not killing a thing and still win! The same thing goes for some of the vehicles, the AT-AT walker is impressive no doubt but I could move faster with 100 weights tied to my ankles! And you have to wait for every shot to charge up before you can fire. The flying vehicles are a real pain too because most of them can’t hover in mid-air and keep flying at the same pace without slowing down. To turn you have to slide your mouse in the right direction rapidly, which is also bad game design. Another thing to worry about is the Droidekas, the rolling droids that put up a round shield. Trust me, these guys are BAD news. If they aren’t dead before that shield’s up, people will start dying quick. To add to their frustrating difficulty, only blasts from vehicles and turrets can break through their shields and destroy them! I really wish that they hadn’t put them in the game, it makes it to hard for the Clones and to easy for the CIS. I also think that they could’ve created exclusive battlegrounds not in the movies and be a little more independent.

My final judgment for Battlefront is that if Pandemic had spent more time evening out the balance issues and had been a bit bolder with level design then this could have been much better. But if you like the concept then I would recommend it’s sequel, Battlefront 2. It has new features such as playing as a jedi hero, new levels and space battles!