(Played Single-player campaign & Resurrection DLC only)

This game looks and sounds amazing. Unfortunately, it's extremely lacking in fun, or an engaging story.

Character models look and animate great; though the people look like slightly potatoey equivalents of their real-life inspirations. Spaceships and environments also look amazing, and very Star Wars-y. The fan service is extremely well done.

Music is very John Williams-y, and the sound effects are spot on. The voice acting for well-known Star Wars characters is mostly-okay -- better than Battlefront 1, at least.

The gameplay in the single player campaign just isn't fun. Pacing is slow, because if you do much more than duck in-and-out of doorways taking pot-shots at enemies, you quickly get killed. While the 3rd person view looks cool, you constantly find your shots getting blocked by the scenery -- a problem that is solved by sticking to the 1st person view. It really felt like they shoehorned the single player campaign into the game's multiplayer-focused mechanics, and didn't do a great job at it. Playing on the Normal difficulty, I found myself dying a lot -- enough that I dropped the difficulty down to Easy on the Resurrection DLC, just so I could be done with it.

The story is a standard bad-guy-turns-good tale that is very predictable. I liked the sarcastic blue alien guy sidekick (whose name I already forgot), at least.

It's fine. Barely. Just not good enough to leave installed (all 120-ish gigabytes of it) on my PS5. (Also, the framerate is pretty disappointing when playing the PS4 version on the PS5. Definitely no good PSPro/PS5 optimizations to be found in this game.)

I would like to state from the get go that this review is only a reflection of the single player campaign. I have zero interest in playing the multiplayer part of this game.

When it comes to the Star Wars universe I'm a traveler. I come and I go with different entries in the cinematic and video game world. I've seen the essential movies and skipped the others. I know who the characters are and the general plot of what has happened. That being said, I was hoping Star Wars Battlefront 2 might get me back on the hype train to revisit the series. While the game does some good it also has a lot of questionable gameplay flaws that get in the way of having fun.

This game looks incredible, as I expected. The details in the world and character designs are excellent. The cutscenes are beautifully rendered with great motion capture. It left me wanting to explore more of these set pieces but unfortunately if you stray too far the objective it tells you to get back to the mission in 10 seconds or game over. This leaves no reason to leave the path, and that path isn't as exciting as one would hope.

During the campaign you play as Iden Versio, a soldier of the Empire and daughter of an Empire general. The story is good, not great, and has some fun moments, but by the end the poor and repeated mission design wore me out and I wanted it to be over. The missions are split up between playing as Iden or a hero from the star wars universe a la Luke, Leia, etc. While these missions seemed like a fun little break from the normal game they happened too frequently during the already short campaign. I wanted to spend more time with Iden but instead about half of my time was playing as someone else. During these missions you spent time essentially doing the same objective over a different skin. Protect this person, reach this spot, kill a whole lot of Stormtroopers to name a couple, but none of them felt rewarding.

When you're on the ground the game gives you the option of playing it as either as a first or third person shooter, well it does half the time. If you're any character besides Iden it's a mandatory 3rd person camera and it doesn't feel great. You're stuck with one weapon for each hero. Luke has his lightsaber and most of the others are pistols. However, when you're Iden you can change your weapon after each death which is a nice perk. You can also apply boosters, select grenade types or other perks.

The way this game is designed it seems like it was to be a cover shooter, but it's also not good at that. Cover often doesn't work well and you're getting hit anyways. Your character can only take a few shots, even Luke and company, before the game over screen pops up and can lead to some really frustrating moments. This is furthered by the terrible check point system.

When flying the ships gameplay shifts into a dog fight. You're often times tasked with destroying certain enemy ships or defending one of yours. Flying around in space is great, unless you run into anything and it's a one hit kill, which then causes you to have to wait for the game to reload. The dog fighting is fine, but getting the controls and feel down at first can be a chore.

Overall, I came into this game with little to no expectations and it let me down still. The game looks phenomenal but plays terribly. If you're a fan of Star Wars you might find some fun in it. I did for about 2 hours of the 6ish hour campaign and quickly became more and more apprehensive to play it.

-Brandon

I used to love the original Battlefront games back in the day. When I bought this game, I’d heard that it was pretty different, but I didn’t realize it wasn’t even the same style of gameplay.

I played the campaign, and despite not finding a single command post, I did enjoy it. The story was interesting, and though I’ve never seen the modern Star Wars movies and barely remember the originals, I could tell it had a lot of nods to the movies, and probably made a lot more sense to fans.

The campaign takes more of a classic shooter approach, giving you narrative objectives to complete rather than command posts to take. I liked how there were a variety of objectives that showcased the different gameplay strategies; some required stealth, some required you to use a given character’s special abilities, and some just required a lot of shooting. I liked Han Solo’s level.

The difficulty was all over the place—I don’t know if I just suck or if some levels were poorly designed, but sometimes I just got absolutely bombarded. I died a lot and had to go on easy mode for two sections.

But it was a good length, and I had a good time.

I can’t really speak to the rest of the game. I tried one match against other players and one against AI, both in the classic command post style (which I was glad to see did make a return), but I got my butt kicked and didn’t have fun.

Frankly, the UI of the menu system is really confusing, and I couldn’t really figure out what else the game had to offer and didn’t care to find out. I played the campaign and moved on.

Maybe others who are more into online play and are actually good at shooters would enjoy whatever else the game has to offer.

This game reminds me of Middle Earth: Shadow of War, which I also played way after it came out.

At a distance, now devoid from its release drama and loot box debacle, Battlefront II offers a pretty enjoyable Star Wars singleplayer campaign and a strong DLC addition in Resurrection (I haven’t tried the multiplayer so I have no idea how that aspect fares). The whole playthrough feels like a quintessential, fan service-driven Star Wars fantasy adventure through which you get to have fun with laser guns, lightsabers, AT-AT walkers, X-wings, TIE fighters, and yes, even the Millennium Falcon. In fact, knowing very little about the game going in, it was actually a nice surprise when I found out I was able to play as some of the most iconic franchise characters in the campaign, all with their specific weapons and different abilities that you can swap around to your strategic advantage. And the best aspect of this is that, for the most part, none its character inclusions feels forced or out of place, working in a complementary way rather than conflicting one. Battlefront II really nails the full SW vibe in tone, visuals and music, and the whole presentation is actually of a noticeably higher quality than I had initially predicted.

The story isn’t anything new, but it’s solidly executed and just the right length, and even though I’m not a fan of pushing narrative conclusions into DLC, Resurrection delivers an unexpectedly emotional wrap up of the whole thing. Well, not the ‘whole thing’ per se, because it too hints at a sequel, except now it’s been all but confirmed we aren’t getting one. We should though. Since the atrocious microtransaction days of Shadow of War and Battlefront II, EA seems have mended their ways when it comes to trying to nickel and dime the customer to the nth degree, and I do believe there is now genuine interest in seeing the continuation of this story. This specific branch of the Star Wars universe offers something markedly different from the Jedi series, and I for one would like to see it return.

There are still some issues with the game. Shooting feels a little bit floaty and it’s hard to get into, checkpoints seem to be a bit too scattered, space combat, albeit satisfying, sometimes makes manoeuvring stiffer than it should for the sake of artificially ballooning difficulty, and enemies come with this weird bug where they often glitch out when using cover. But these problems are never front and centre throughout your time with Battlefront II, and that, combined with its highs, make this a very easy recommendation for anyone into the Star Wars universe. I just wish it could continue onto Battlefront III. 7.5/10