Star Wars Battlefront

It turns out that, so befuddled is Star Wars Battlefront, that simply celebrating it for what it is feels dishonest. It’s an extraordinary mess of brilliant ideas melded with utterly harebrained ones; of thoughtful and charming fan service doing battle against a piledriving Palpatine and idiotic dialogue that sounds like it was recorded in a toilet.

The multiplayer can be fantastic at times and battles play out beautifully and smoothly in all modes. The game looks sleek and listening to those iconic blasters adds to the thrill of play. However, with lackluster battle and survival missions replacing a proper campaign, it stops the title from being as amazing as it could have been.

Battlefront is a fantastic game for a certain type of person. Its dip in, dip out accessibility, matched with the obvious lashings of love and detail from a development team that clearly respect the franchise and its fans - it is absolutely perfect for fans of the original trilogy who these days have limited game time.

This is a strong return for the Battlefront moniker, but there's much room for improvement.

Battlefront doesn't go much deeper than its ambitious surface appeal. It front loads its best content, only to fade in quality as the hours roll by. Star Wars Battlefront's skin is beautiful, but its legs are shaking, and threaten to buckle with time.

What DICE have done is create what is arguably the most faithful and graphically coherent representation of the Star Wars universe we’ve ever seen. However, while that alone is incredibly alluring, there’s currently not enough variety to the multiplayer modes, weaponry or the single player content compared with other entries in the series and within the FPS genre.

The effort that DICE has put into the visuals pays off in one of the best-looking games of the year. But every facet of the game is hurt by the lack of variety in the environments, vehicles, weapons, and even enemies. It's a startlingly limited package made more disappointing by the fact that the actual gameplay is really fun. It may reach its potential in a year; but for now, it's one more potentially great game sabotaged by what appears to be a cynical marketing plan.

Beautiful but lacking, Star Wars: Battlefront will most certainly please Star Wars fans with incredible fan service from DICE. While it stacks up in terms of presentation to other contemporary shooters, Battlefront is an extraordinarily thin offering when it comes to content, making it less enjoyable the more you play it.

Too limited in its maps and modes to keep people hooked, it will nevertheless provide enough fun to jump onto once in a while, hear that famous score and maybe take down an AT-AT. Those who wanted a Battlefront III, however, will have to wait a little while longer.

Star Wars: Battlefront is everything a Star Wars fan could want. The game’s locations feel iconic, complete recreations of the beautiful settings introduced to us in the movies. But the game’s casual attitude towards weapons, and the limited number of locations to explore make Star Wars: Battlefront sizzle out far too early. Top that with an exorbitant DLC offer, which features content that feels like it could be in the base game, and EA has already done a great job of freezing Star Wars: Battlefront in carbonite before it’s even had a chance to live a fulfilling life.

It’s designed for people who want to whoop and holler because, “We’re playing a Star Wars game!” Which is fine, of course. But dedicated shooter fans need to understand that the average Battlefront match has all the sophistication of two blunt rocks bashing into one another for a 10-minute stretch.

Slick production values, solid controls, and tons of fan service can't make up for mediocre progression and a lack of content.

Star Wars Battlefront feels authentic in many ways, but that authenticity is aggressively pursued at the cost of gameplay, and is often tacked-on. If you're in the mood for a relatively shallow shooter with caveats you likely won't be disappointed, but I wish that DICE had a little more time to polish it and add more substance.