Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005)

Diary of the 501st, I have stumbled upon a review site that wants to discuss our combat prowess.

Battlefront 2 is a very well made shooter, it does a great job at showing you large scale battles in the Star Wars universe.

The legendary

• The scale of the battles is impressive. The maps are very big and traveling to locations on foot shows it; you can see skirmishes happening everywhere, hear radio messages of battle reports, etc. The map that does it the best is Hoth, the map is incredibly big and there are tunnels everywhere.
• The space battles are intense. Enemies everywhere, turret fire on all sides, dogfights everywhere. And the game gives you many options to destroy capital ships, either from the inside or from the outside.
• Galactic Conquest is a very interesting game mode. You have to take over planets and accumulate resources faster than your opponent, then use those credits to buy more units or bonus like garrisons or leader units. This mode can take a long time to complete because of how dynamic it is at the start.
• Most factions have the same units, but several tend to vary; the CSI gets Droidekas with OP shields and Magnaguards with rocket launchers, the Republic gets jetpack troopers plus machinegun commanders, the Rebels get bowcasting Wookkies and Bothan spies, the Empire gets Dark Troopers and officers. None of them function the same.
• No vehicle feels the same. The starfighters fire different amount of projectiles or even different kinds all together, each faction has unique land vehicles with different properties depending on the scenario.
• It has all the music from the movies.
• The campaign mode is a bit basic but the narration done by Temuera Morrison is so well done that it becomes legendary, it gives you a good insight into what the Clones were thinking; also the voice lines have become memes.

The terrible odds

• The game is extremely unbalanced. The Droidekas are almost invincible, the clone commander has infinite ammo so you can mow down dozens easily, the Bothan Spy is useless because he barely does damage, the Imperial Officer can't do much either.
• The leaders are either overpowered or too weak. Chewbacca is almost useless because he can't kill people fast enough, any Jedi of The Republic can solo whole squadrons, Boba Fett is just a Jet Trooper that hits harder; the only faction's heroes I say are balanced are the CIS and the Rebels, since they have at least two overpowered units while The Republic has a lot more.

Overall

This game aged well, it is even better than the two games EA released. It has much more content, more modes and is more intense.

This is an old multiplayer game. The single-player campaign is almost the same as playing multiplayer maps against the AI. Only a handful of people still play this, and most of them are on private servers. It's barely worth installing to see what it is like, let alone paying €8 for what's essentially a dead game.

The gunplay has aged so poorly i wouldn't even recommend it if there were more people playing it. The weapons have no 'feel' to them and the AI moves overly jittery, magically dodging your shots sometimes. This was barely acceptable 14 years ago, let alone in 2019.

I don't even want to know how many hours I sank into this as a kid.

I hope after the license deal between Disney and EA ends, we can get a developer that cares creates a great Star Wars game such as this one and KOTOR. I played the heck out of this game back on PS2, and it's even better on PC. I recommend Battlefront II (2005) to any fan of Star Wars.

Played on PC, PS2