Review | Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection

Győző "FairyEmpire" Baki2 weeks agoLast Updated: April 2, 2024

0 231 6 minutes read

Many sleepless nights were had back in the 2000’s, playing Pandemic Studios’ iconic multiplayer shooters Star Wars Battlefront and Star Wars Battlefront 2 – certainly up there with the likes of Halo, Battlefield 1942 and Quake 3 Arena as some of the most addictive shooters of the early millenium. Both games have now been remastered in a single package for modern platforms: let’s see what remastering work was done and how well these shooters still hold up to this day!

It’s the 2000’s and the prequels are the worst thing ever

At a time where over half of the Star Wars movies are divisive, the extended canon of the books being hit and miss and other projects also greatly varying in quality, there’s one thing that almost always delivered for George Lucas’ (and now Disney’s) behemoth: videogames. Somehow, this sci-fi cult franchise has generally escaped the dreaded licensed videogame curse of being based on movies and just not being very good at all. With the exception of a few notable flops, throughout the decades we got so much goodness: the also recently remastered “Doom clone” DARK FORCES, the majestic RPGs of the Knights of the Old Republic series, the brilliant lasersword-wielding action of the Jedi Knight games, the old school X-Wing series bringing us to epic spaceship-fights in space, the classic RTS Empire At War, all the way to the more recent third person action adventures by Respawn Entertainment, namely Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor. Younger fans may be especially familiar with DICE, of Battlefield fame, recently making two Battlefront games, offering large scale online battles between the Empire and the rebels over massive arenas, with the use of blasters, laserswords, vehicles and much more. What slightly older fans may remember, however, is that DICE’s Star Wars-based shooters are merely a reboot of now-defunct Pandemic Studios’ series from the 2000’s, one with a ludicrous amount of nostalgia tied to it to its day, with communities still gathering to play these classics from time to time. Lucky us then that it’s these very games that have been brought back to modern systems in all of their glory, packed with every piece of content from both games and almost no changes to anything, all to mantain that core old school multiplayer fun.

So what even are these games? For the best term of comparison, think of DICE’s recent Battlefield or Battlefront games. Two teams, usually the rebels and the Empire, duke it out on arenas with several points of interest, in game modes ranging from Conquest to more classic deathmatch variants. The best way to learn the ins and outs of all that is to jump into both games’ “campaign” modes – but I used the quotation marks for a reason. You see, most arena shooters at the time did not feature a bombastic campaign like Halo or Call of Duty did – the norm was to have either not have a story mode at all or to have these missions be effectively a simulation of the online experience by adding bots to various maps and common gameplay scenarios, loosely connected by a generic plot. Indeed, in the case of Battlefront and Battlefront 2, nobody really looks back at these campaigns, and they’re absolutely not the meat of the experience. That is the online multiplayer, which we’ll dive into shortly.

Illusion

As for the actual gameplay, players not only get different weapons and abilities depending on which side they choose, but even there the variety largely changes based on the roles selected. Again, think of Battlefield’s class system. You have the inevitable sniper class with a weak pistol and a powerful rifle to kill from a distance with, the much more agile and medium-range oriented assault troops and so on. The arenas even feature ground and air vehicles aside, allowing players to traverse through the arena quicker and in some cases to even use these machines as weaponry, via their mounted laser guns and so on. Battlefront 2 even introduces playable Jedi or Sith warriors that players can call in and control after achieving certain results. This is when adrenaline skyrockets, as our relatively slow-paced big team battles turn into high octane fight with lightsabers and the use of the Force itself, that allow us to slash through the weak infantry in mere seconds. It’s way more satisfying than killstreaks in games like Call of Duty for sure.

So yeah, it all sounds great, doesn’t it? Except for the fact that I pretty much only talked about the original games thus far. Well, this double pack of shooters is… barely adeguate, at its best moments, and absolutely insufficient at it worst. In terms of visuals and controls, not much changed at all: resolution is obviously higher and using a more modern controller feels nice, but there’s very little people can even do tweak the controls, with the flying vehicles of the first game having inverted controls by default with no option to change them. Some iconic audio tracks, such as the ones in the loading screen, are also inexplicably changed – though I usually don’t make a fuss about such things, as these often boil down to copyrights and contracts. But more bafflingly, despite there being very little changed, the two games occupy nearly 60GB of our precious Series X|S storage, whereas the original games were a couple gigabytes each. Truly incomprehensible, as there really isn’t any noticeable texture improvements or anything drastic. Likewise, the loading times of matches seem way too high for the amount of quality of assets, with even a standard bot match on a small map usually taking 10-15 seconds to load up on the current-gen hardware’s notably very fast solid state drives.

A disturbance in the netcod-, I mean, the Force

But these are just smaller annoyances on top of a few very crucial base issues the game has in its current state. Let’s cut to the chase: the online multiplayer is painfully inadequate. I tried playing several times over the last week or so, and one of three results always happened:

The game would not find a single match.
The game would put me inside a match, but I and many other players were not able to spawn in any way.
The game does put me inside of a match, but it’s one hampered by extreme lag and ludicrously high pings.

It’s nigh unplayable online as of now, and developers already promised fixes – but I have to review the state of the game now, and as of now the online matches barely work. And that’s not even all – certain game modes can’t be played online for some reason, only offline, with also no crossplay whatsoever. In 2024, for a multiplayer shooter not to share its servers between Xbox, PlayStation and so forth, is just baffling. And as abundantly seen by the lack of a visual overhaul, a general lack of options and various other technical woes, the impression players may (perhaps rightfully) get is that this game was simply made to run, but hardly ever tested or fleshed out.

Great games, remastered poorly

So ultimately, Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection is a severely disappointing remaster work of two classics that aged a good bunch, yet are still enjoyable due to the sheer quality of these iconic shooters. Not only there’s very little in terms of additions, but there’s plenty of baffling design choices and technical woes too, ranging from limited control options, broken multiplayer, an unexplainably huge install size, and even a lack of crossplay that puts these titles’ multiplayer population at a serious risk of dying fast, unless the developers manage to fix everything quickly – but one would think such rampant issues wouldn’t be there if they were so easy to solve. It’s a shame because the matches against bots remind me of the fact that these games, as old as they are, are still a ton of fun: the classes, the weapons, the maps, the vehicles – everything still flows well. But unless you’re a hardcore fan of these classic shooters and you’re satisfied just playing against bots, I’d suggest sitting this one out, at least until enough patches have come out – assuming there’s still a decent enough playerbase by then.