This Tuesday was the arrival of the highly anticipated "Star Wars: Battlefront" reboot from developer Electronic Arts. The game promised to be ambitious and rewarding to the cross-section of longtime "Star Wars" fans and DICE studio fans. The expectations for the game were high following an open beta that started on October 8 on PC, Xbox One, and Playstation 4. The game that has launched lives up to the hype in many ways.
After checking to make sure that my console was up to date, I slipped in the game CD and booted it up. After a minor day one patch, I was on to the title screen that featured an adorable R2-D2 making beeps and boops. Behind that there was the main menu which was sleek and divided between multiplayer on the left and “Missions” on the right. I decided to get all the tutorials out of the way so I wouldn’t be surprised. These were childish mini-games that had little incentives for completing them under a certain time or with a certain score. After smashing through all five of them including a flight tutorial, hero tutorial, and basic combat tutorial among others, I decided I was ready for the multiplayer.
To no great surprise, the multiplayer is fantastic in many regards owing to the recent experiments DICE has made in "Battlefield 4" and "Battlefield: Hardline," although. The controls were tight and many of the game’s unique mechanics stood out very early in the matches. To begin with there is a “Star Card” system, which is set in the bottom right corner of the heads up display, these are attributes or tools that your character brings with them into battle and can be customized in the spectating screen. Some of the cards replace anti-personnel and anti-equipment grenades while others give you a one-shot sniper that comes back after a cool down. In effect what this does is that it streamlines what you carry into the battle, you have two cards that give you equipment for a short while and one card slot that can be used for active or passive character effect. The latter is unlocked at higher levels and help you deal more damage or play more defensively, in short the third slot amplifies your play style.
There are about eleven weapons available at the moment, although that is sure to change with the December 8 free downloadable content patch of the Battle of Jakku. There are also four major DLC’s planned to be released although we know no details about them. The weapons we have access to now cannot be customized in any way. I believe that this makes the game better because it forces the player to be strategic in their weapons choices depending on the terrain and their play-style. There is one, short-range, shotgun type blaster (of Jawa origin in the "Star Wars" films), three medium blaster, three heavy blasters, one sniper type blaster and finally three hand blasters. Each has special attributes, some shoot faster but do less damage, others are slower but have much better range and damage. It is up to the player which weapon suits them best in different encounters. The maps themselves have long and short range areas more suited to different kinds of blaster-play. In this way, no one single weapon dominates the game, although the Han Solo hand blaster that comes with the deluxe and limited editions has very good versatility.
Another system that synchronizes well with the weapons and Star Cards is the battle-pickup system that DICE fans saw in "Battlefield 4" and "Hardline." This system, wherein the player picks up glowing tokens around the battlefield, randomly gives the player access to powerful equipment such as thermal detonators and automated turrets. Because of the way this system is set up one team cannot spam one piece of equipment and dominated the game. Every battle-pickup is a one-time-use tool and generally help the team overall.
There are several fun and interesting game modes, most of which are quite unique in their iteration, although there is a team-deathmatch-like mode called ‘Blast’. The game modes indicate how many players will be in a match at the same time if there are vehicle tokens (battle-pickups that allow players to enter vehicles), or hero tokens (which let the player be iconic characters like Luke Skywalker and others for a short time). Overall the game modes use the genre and settings of the Star Wars universe to bring the player on wonderful and harrowing adventures with every match.
Finally, I will not go over every little gameplay mechanic that has been introduced but I feel as though I have covered the broad strokes of the game. "Star Wars: Battlefront" gives me a lot of hope for the future of first- and third-person shooters because it introduces us to so many new and fun mechanics that are sure to show up in games later in the life-span of the PS4. My girlfriend and I have enjoyed trading off matches and fighting our way to victory against Rebels and Imperials alike. This game, with its projected DLC’s, will probably end up with the massive load of content many expected it to have on launch. This is one of the trends that has me worried about future games but never the less Star Wars: Battlefront is a fun ride that is sure to entertain me and my girlfriend for quite a while. Even though she is neither a DICE studios fan nor a "Star Wars" fan, even she has begun to enjoy both the scenery and the gameplay.
