I spent way more time than I thought I would this weekend playing the Star Wars: Battlefront Beta. Way more. How did you find it?
Just as a disclaimer: I’ve never been much of a Battlefield player. Or a Call of Duty player for that matter. Battlefield especially wasn’t my thing. I don’t really enjoy the scale of it, didn’t really care for the vehicle combat. Not that I didn’t recognise the quality, more that it just wasn’t for me. Not suited to my tastes. I’m more of an arena shooter fan. I prefer balanced, simple shooters. Not really into the whole levelling up gear thing, becoming a ‘Captain’. Just not for me.
Star Wars: Battlefront might be the game that changes that for me.
A massive part of the reason is the license. I know, that’s terrible. But DICE has done such a good job of replicating the sound and feel of Star Wars. The way your enemies flop over when shot, the way the effects don’t look like CGI, but instead mimic the practical effects used in the original movies. That level of detail is super important. For someone who grew up watching Star Wars over and over again, it’s a nostalgia hit, straight to the groin.
Things I loved:
— Active reload
— Boost jumps
— The feeling of firing weapons
— Hoth. All of it.
— The card system
Things I didn’t like:
— Weapon balance isn’t quite there
— Spawns are seriously messed up
— I just can’t take Admiral Ackbar seriously any more
How did you find the Beta?
Comments
67 responses to “Community Review: Star Wars: Battlefront”
The game looked great, it played so so, ended up playing it in 3rd person as 1st person just didn’t feel right.
The controls for flying is a bit odd as well.
Shooting stuff felt fine, but the start weapons for both sides feel very unbalanced.
The Hoth map, very unbalanced in difficulty or people just didn’t know how to play as Rebels?
Most games I was in the Empire won that.
It really did feel like you were in a star wars battle, although it’d be nice if there was some NPCs running around as well.
The beta did convince me to get the game.
Oh I was playing on ps4
How were flight controls odd, might I ask?
I found them way easier to pick up and learn than the vehicles in battlefield.
Throttle being left joystick, the evasive manoeuvres being on dpad.
Controls felt lose and disconnected.
I liked them. Thought the vehicle handling was tight and east to get used to.
*shrug*
Yeah it’s probably too simple for me from what I’m used to.
Alright buddy…
It was good – doesn’t bring anything truly new to the genre.
I love me some SW, but i think i’ll pass on this, as EA burnt me with Hardline.
You could see Hardline was going to flop well in advance dude, I’d say that one is on you!
Yeah the beta to Hardline left me cold – no matter how many times j tried that bank map I didn’t feel like I was getting any closer to mastering the game.
By contrast my Sunday matches of Battlefront make the guy on Saturday look like an amateur.
That’s how I know it’s gonna be a good MP experience for me – if I feel like I’m getting better at it.
I played the Drop Zone mode for around 4-5 hours on the weekend. Had a blast! I’m not a multiplayer guy. Pretty much never play online, but everyone was complaining about the casual nature of the game. Thought it might suit a not-very-good player like myself haha.
Turns out I was right. It was awesome. Not “full price at launch” awesome. But still awesome.
I really loved the game, loved the focus on objectives more than previous games where a lot of people would just be in it for a good kill score. But those who go for the objectives can easily get 40 kills.
Kinda annoyed there’s no more classes, replaced by a ‘card’ system. I guess in the full version we’ll be seeing more classic class based items, but at the moment I don’t think I’ll be firing a smoke grenade and reviving a down ally.
The weapons are too accurate, so everybody naturally gravitates towards the faster firing rate weapons. The weapon spread is basically non-existent and even in the loading menus they state that crouching provides no aiming bonus (so why have crouch at all?).
I’m annoyed that the Empire can use Rebel turrets and items. At any time a Stormtrooper can sneak behind enemy lines and get plenty of kills before being taken out.
crouch is for getting some cover.
I enjoyed it for the most part. Couple of points:
– If I would buy a game solely for the presentation it would be this game. Probably one of the best sounding games I’ve played in a long time with little touches in the menus and general look that just made it feel right when starting it up.
– The look of the game is great in areas they showed. Yes, glare might have been overboard but Hoth and Tatooine felt and looked great with a lot detail going on in the background.
Couple of negative points:
– The game is fast. Probably to fast and closer to COD than anything I can think of and this got frustrating. The time to kill was very quick and made for a lot of deaths.
– Balance issues with Hoth. Aside from one very rare game where the rebels won on Hoth, it was generally impossible for the Rebel team to win. Be interesting to see how they balance it.
– Grenade refill time is quite quick meaning that you’ll see grenades more often than not and it’s a one hit kill.
Probably not going to get it straight away, learned my lesson from BF4.
Rebels can easily win if they work together. Protect the links, constantly upload, cover the center hill and abuse the furthest hill when you can.
If the people in the skies are worth a damn then they’ll focus all fire on AT-STs during their bombing runs, and once the AT-ATs become vulnerable focus all fire on the AT-AT walking through the center, then move on to the one on the outside.
For my first victory we managed to destroy both AT-ATs at the second phase.
yeah, same here. The only time I saw a rebel victory was cause a few rebel pilots kept air superiority the whole time.
It’s not really about superiority. If they spend all their time chasing Tie Fighters then they’re not contributing to the match. It’s always been like that in Battlefield. It’s why I always spent my time bombing tanks and campers. Sure, someone might take off and chase me down, but it was a futile effort as I quickly dodge them and returned to support the troops.
It sure bloody helps though
Those Y wings don’t so much on their own.
A couple of proton torpedoes from the X wings really punch those ATATs down pretty quick.
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I played about 10 or more games on Hoth in a row and never lost as the rebels. if the whole team works to get those objectives as the rebels it is achievable.
But if your team are missing the objectives and just going for kills then there’s no hope at winning.
It seemed as if you got more XP for kills than objectives.
it’s totally supposed to be hard to succeed as the rebels on Hoth. The imbalance is what makes this mode so awesome, it creates some awesome teamwork moments. Once we sussed out the uplink situation, we had a pretty good success rate as rebels. best mode.
I agree with this. The Rebels are meant to be major underdogs that get stomped all over with ease by them Empire. Winning as the Empire never felt that satisfying, it could be really easy. When you won as the Rebels it felt way better.
Getting to those objectives and succeeding was really fun, made even more fun if you have a partner to play with. Working together with my brother on Hoth was really rewarding. Covering eachother, awwww man so much fun!
rocking a full party = total domination. i reckon we had like 10 y-wings lined up in one phase. unleashed the fury. so good.
The beta runs better than Battlefield 4 ever has including its current state!
Pro: Terrific audio, graphics with a nice simple menu design.
Con: I found myself bored after a couple of hours play. Perhaps the full game might offer more entertainment, but I don’t intend on buying it for a while. Poor vehicle performance. Rebels pretty much always lose on Hoth with next to no weapons to counter the attack.
I rate it two “Meh’s” out of five.
I’m still cautious. The BF4 beta also ran quite well, then quickly deteriorated in the first week of release.
I don’t think I played the BF4 beta, but I hope that isn’t the case for Battlefront.
A lot of fun
Great sound
Great Graphics
Terrible server browser
Overall game severely lacks depth
Doubt the game will last very long but it will be a good month of fun for those who buy it.
“Game lacks depth”
You realise it was beta, yeah?
I agree it lacks depth.
The rounds just seemed like a cluster fuck, random spawn locations and next to no strategy required to play. That’s why I found myself becoming bored quite quickly.
I just hope the full game is more entertaining.
I loved the visuals and the sound was spectacular. As a massive fan of the battlefield series though this game feels like BF-Casual… I can’t see where they are going to get the depth that battlefield has in it’s builds and weapon/attachment selections. Maybe this is a good thing? For me though it seems like I’ll have a lot of fun with it for a few hours then get very very stale.
I was pleasantly surprised with it as before playing the beta I hadn’t been planning to get it as was expecting it to turn out to be another titanfall (some interesting ideas but fall flat) I had a blast with the game. One thing nobody else has seems to mention is the game mode where you fight off wave of enemies this mode was great as me and my brother were able to play local split-screen and fight off the waves of stormtroopers really reminded me of all the fun we had with a similar mode in CoD:MW3
tldr: Before beta didn’t want to buy after beta going to buy.
I was really impressed with how well it ran on my decidedly mid-range gaming PC. I was able to run 1080/60 on High with a GTX 760, which is nice to see. Especially when the graphics looked that good.
Was very strange firing from the hip and not using the scope – took a great deal of Destiny-honed skill unlearning.
Not sure there’s enough content for $100 though. Could see myself getting bored of what’s there pretty quickly.
JB will be selling the game for $79. Never pay $100 for a game, period.
Loved it. Its a lot of fun and I’m now looking forward to release. The only things I didnt like were the instant respawns and how easily you die. Felt a bit CoD-like.
Call of Duty – Star Warfare 3
The game was awesome
Pro: Graphics and backgrounds simply amazing especially Hoth.
Finding powerups like darth or luke
Controlling Xwing, Tie Fighter, At-St awesome
Cons: Yes rebels are disadvantaged on hoth. I always liked the empire better so works for me.
Tatooine level too small.
Limited leveling up (can’t blame it being beta though)
Honestly, one of the most mind numbing bores I have played in years. Sit back and shoot your one weapon, with infinite ammo and invite range while you avoid being spawn ambushed. Honestly just terrible.
If that was how you are playing then you are doing it wrong
It’s how everyone plays…
Ok. That wasn’t my experience with it, but I can see how people may have played it that way, which would have been pretty awful.
If you played on the Rebel side, and had, you know, teamwork and strategy, which was required to overcome the Empire’s superior firepower, then the game was a lot deeper, and a lot more fun than that. If you played any game the way you described, it would be pretty boring.
I also played a whole lot more than I anticipated I would. As already stated, game looks and sounds great. I like the fast pace gameplay, it always feels like there is a massive war going on in walker assault, despite the size of the teams having the instant respawn allows you to get back into the action quickly.
The game itself runs flawlessly on my PC, no real issues getting into servers. Only bug I saw was occasionally using a vehicle/hero pickup you wouldn’t spawn into vehicle. Spawns are all messed up though, you can easily camp the enemy aircraft spawn as they’re forced to endure the unskippable animation, also if the enemy gets behind your lines in walker assault, they can easily camp your spawn. Spawns need to be tweaked. But they are the only issues I can see. Also I think once the game comes out you’ll see less annoying head shots due to a greater diversity of gear being used.
Walker assault specifically I think is balanced pretty well, rebels just need to learn how to win where imperials don’t need to learn anything really, simply march forward and kill. I also found controlling the skies you can do very well as the rebels, if you can keep the tie interceptors out of it in the last section the speeders can easily deal with the walkers, not to mention the a-wings can do huge damage to a AT-AT. As the weekend went on I found the win/loss ratio was becoming a lot more even.
Can’t wait to see the different modes and locations at release.
I loved it at first, but the longer I played the more it started to wear a bit thin. Once the initial awesomeness wears off – once you start digging beneath that lovely Star Wars surface. the less you actually find.
A lot of people have accused it of being Battlefield but with Star Wars. I WISH that’s what it was. But it’s been drastically simplified, which I guess is understandable – that Star Wars brand is going to bring in a lot of the casual audience, and it needs to be accessible to them. The lack of classes and squads, in particular, takes away a lot of the teamwork and tactics that Battlefield at its best encourages and leaves it as more of a lone-wolf run and gun kind of game. Which is fine in and of itself, but think it’ll struggle to hold my interest long term.
I’ll still probably pick it up and have some fun with it, but I suspect I’ll probably be done with it in a month or two and will probably go back to BF4 as my online shooter of choice, even with its lag issues.
Yeah, I’m really bummed that they didn’t keep a class system. Similar to BF or the old battlefront games. It would certainly have given players a little variety and in the old Battlefront games they were pretty balanced in their pro’s and con’s (range vs mobility etc).
If you wanted a jet pack in the old games: Shock trooper. Want a pilot that repairs ships (engineer) you could choose it, but you sacrificed your fire power (They had bombs, repair tools and pistols). etc. Guns that ‘cool down’ even though the models have power cells (ammo clips) on them, or gun scopes that transition to ‘cut outs’ instead of sites, even though the guns in the films and models in the game have normal sights anyway, really makes it seem like they kept the worst of the old school stuff from the old Battlefront games and didn’t keep the good stuff (classes, tanks, massive battles, etc) or LOGICAL advancements that have been made to the genre since the PS2 games.
TLDR; It just seems too over simplified.
Yeah, but like I said above, I think the over-simplification is deliberate.
I don’t think the Battlefield crowd are the primary audience for this – it’s aiming for a more casual crowd that will be attracted by the Star Wars branding. They probably want to keep it simple for those people. That also probably explains the lack of a server browser.
Oh yeah, I did see that and I do agree with it. I also think it’s a darn shame though. Edit: I find it odd that DICE aren’t targeting either the Battlefield crowd or, from what I’ve played and seen, the Battlefront crowd.
Yeah, when this was announced, a lot of people dismissed it, saying “it’ll just be Battlefield with a Star Wars skin on it”. Personally, that sounded like an absolute dream game for me, which is why I’m left feeling a bit empty when I play this. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just not what it could have been.
Well, tbh, I think “Battlefield with a star wars skin on it” would be closer to Battlefront than what we ended up with haha. I also agree, it’s not bad, it’s just not amazing either.
I didn’t play the beta – haven’t upgraded to next gen so this is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment but aren’t the Rebels MEANT to lose on Hoth? Pretty sure they were fighting a rear guard action to get the transports away!
I was pleasantly surprised by the end of the weekend that the game played quite well. Apart from the obvious need for a bit of tweaking/refining I had a blast. It has a nice fast pace helped by the instant respawns/friend spawns as well as relatively quick round times. Some work on the spawns would be great as I don’t enjoy spawning into instant death.
I wasn’t that interested in it before playing the beta/demo but will probably grab it at some point.
As everyone is saying the game looks and sounds great, up there with the best. I just can’t help but feel this game isn’t targeted at me. I played until level 5 and bought all the cards and after it all I just felt like there wasn’t enough depth for a purchase. I’m really glad they put out this demo though, had fun for the weekend.
I spent all weekend playing the beta on PS4 and loved every minute of it. Third person is the way to go. Good solid fun!
Walker Assault was great, you could zone out and pretend to be in the thick of the battle. I know it was early days but I thought the balancing was fine. It is supposed to be hard for the rebels, but if more people played the objectives like capture and defend the uplinks, kept their supers for the AT-ATs and use aircraft, things would be a lot closer.
As someone who remembers queuing up to watch The Empire Strikes Back in the cinema as a kid, this is exactly what I wanted from this. Look forward to playing the full game.
It looked and sounded amazing. It was fun enough, but thanks to BF4 I refuse to buy EA/DICE games until they’ve been released and reviewed for a few week sor months. Hopefully by that time I can get it for about $40 off G2A or GMG.
Don’t forget about Mexican Origin via VPN.
Do tell?
If you have access to a Mexican VPN you can set your region to Mexico and then goto the origin store via chrome and the prices are cheaper. I bought BF4 direct from origin for about 35 usd on release day and the same for Dragon Age: Inquisition
You can use the Hola extension for chrome but a lot of people recently have been saying there are security issues with Hola.
Here is a link to the original BF4 thread that taught me about it a few years ago.
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/118117
I’m a Star Wars fan but not really a Battlefield fan, so got my ass handed to me lol. It really nails the Star Wars vibe – sounds, music etc, and has hyped me up even more for the Force Awakens, but doubt I will get this. Especially with Fallout 4 coming soon.
“— I just can’t take Admiral Ackbar seriously any more”
I love Admiral Ackbar!
Visually spectacular on PS4, I loved how much it felt and sounded like Star Wars. It didn’t keep me playing though, I’m just not that good at those twitchy multiplayer games. I keep getting my ass kicked by players who seem to have extremely quick pin-point accuracy. Oh well. If you can play offline with bots (like the original Battlefield games) and there is a decent single player experience, then I may be in as I really loved the Star Wars atmosphere, but I’m not competitive enough for multiplayer. I kept going back to MGSV.
Awesome game, just not for my play style.
Loved it except for the party system.
We tried for about two hours to get a party of four into the same game and it never happened.
It’s crazy that the party leader doesn’t drag the whole party into a game with the correct amount of available slots.
It worked fine for us when we had 2 or 3 in a party but with 4 it was a total mess. At one point I couldn’t join a game (any game) if I was in the party of 4. As soon as I left the party I could join a game.
Sometimes we all joined the same game….we could see our names in the player list…but when you checked the list after a couple of deaths we were in different servers! I have no idea how the hell that shit happens.
Exact same thing happened to us.
It said we were all joining the same server then once we were in and checked the scoreboard, it turned out we weren’t.
Gave me a big ol’ frowny face.
I’ll probably just stick to Star Wars Battlefront 1/2.
Overall I was pleasantly surprised.
Played on PC. Some party and partner issues and also failed server connects, but otherwise the game ran smooth the entire time. Everything defaulted to High.
Sound is amazing. And seeing and hearing the map lit up by lasers and explosions is great Star Wars candy. I do think the Heroes should be slightly faster/ agile but they are great.
I expect I would play this one enough to warrant a purchase at some point but probably not on release. Not expecting to have the dollars at the time.
I quite like Walker Assault on Hoth. I have been in many Rebel victories as well as defeats. Similar scenario when playing the Imperials. Seems okay to me and it makes those hard fought Rebel victories a little bit sweeter. Looking forward to seeing how it all comes together and hoping for a lot more stuff to unlock.
Big fan of the menus and presentation as well. Nice and clean and, well, Star Wars.
Want to go to Endor on a Speeder Bike so bad now.
Loving it so far! Just hope the controls/mechanics for ships get a little more refined when the full release comes through.
Reading some of these comments
You guys know that was a beta, right?
Lmao
This game is like a hot babe, great engine, nice graphics, sound design is flawless. However it lacks depth, ya ya it’s beta, but more like a demo since the release date is just 1 month away. You are paying for a game that looks great but lacks depth ones you get into it. Also it’s good for casuals.
Did many people play this game using its partner system? I feel like the ones that struggled a lot or maybe didn’t like it as much, didn’t have a partner.
I felt that it made the game much more fun, even if your team was sucking at Hoth, you and your partner could be tearing up the battlefield and hitting those objectives together. So good. Loved it.