Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
99 of 109 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Another hit for LucasArts!, September 20, 2004
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
I got the chance to get my hands on the full version, and I can easily say this is another quality game from LucasArts! Combine some of the best new first-person shooters with Rogue Squadron, and this is what you have here.
You get to play as either a Rebel or Imperial in various famous Star Wars locations from all the movies (and books/games too). There are different types of characters, from soldiers to snipers to special forces.
The first person controls are excellent, but I found flying the aircraft (eg: X-Wing, Tie) to be a little difficult with the mouse and keyboard, but you might get the hang of it after some practice.
You get to control various vehicles and ships too, such as X-Wings, Ties, Gunships, Speeder Bikes, AT-STs, and AT-ATs. Nothing beats driving an AT-AT in snowy Hoth bearing down on Rebel scum, watching them run as you pick them off. You feel the slowness and how heavy the AT-AT is as you drive it. On the other hand, you feel the pure speed of a speeder bike on Endor as the backgroud blurs while you fly through the forest. Great sense of speed there.
The graphics are very good. Not on the level of the newest such as Doom3, but are top notch. And you have the classic Star Wars sound effects and music tracks that are unforgetable.
If you are a Star Wars fan and a gamer, this won't disappoint.
No Ewoks were harmed in writing this review.
|
|
|
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Star Wars meets Battlefield 1942, October 18, 2004
Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars
Want to pilot your own Landspeeder or AT-AT or blast away from your very own Tie-Fighter or X-Wing? Want to fight dozens of enemy troops, defending your command post, or go on the offensive with Jedis like Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker and Mace Windu? No problem. Lucasarts has developed a respectable conversion of what made Battlefield 1942 so popular and put you into the Star Wars universe.
Like BF1942, controls are simplistic. The left mouse fires and the right uses a secondary weapon, usually a grenade. You choose from four or five different fighter classes. These range from standard infantry with a rifle and pistol, a missile launcher carrier, a sniper, a pilot class with weak weapons but the ability to fix machines and turrets, and a class of fighter with special weapons specific to whatever map you're playing. Your fighter starts out at one of the command points you control and you progress to take out the enemy by taking out the fighters controlling an area. As you linger in an enemy zone, the enemy command center changes from red to white, meaning they can no longer spawn fighters there, to green meaning you have successfully taken over the center and can now spawn your fighters. Once all enemy command centers have been taken over, you win.
Single player mode gives you a feel for the different maps, but is pretty easy to conquer. Maps are diverse and what you would expect to see, including Tatooine, Hoth, Naboo, and Endor. Although galactic conquest gives you a few 30 second video clips as you progress from place to place, there's really no storyline. The main reason to buy this is for online play as you'll get bored with single player mode after a night or two.
Online play is the chaotic mess you expect with all the good and bad that comes with it. You can have up to 32 players online and those with broadband should find surprisingly stable gameplay assuming you're playing on a good server. System requirements are pretty lax as well. Even on a mid range system you can crank the resolution up to 1600x1200 if your video card can handle it. The familiar Star Wars score blasts from the speakers and the sound effects from the blasters and the various vehicles remain faithful to the films.
While these types of games are fun to jump into to kill an hour or two, it can get old after a while. Basically you jump into a map, kill a few, get killed, rinse and repeat. In Star Wars Battlefront, the heavy equipment tends to be a little too powerful. If you're on the ground with an with an enemy vehicle staring at you, you're done. In addition, Jedi warriors, if allowed, are practically invincible. There is (unfortunately) a lot of incentive to camp somewhere with a sniper rifle and/or man a turret and blast everything that comes your way as in both cases you'll usually last longer. My last gripe is with the controls on the X-Wings and Tie-Fighters which will take a lot of practice to get used to. This is the skill item of the game and those who master these will be able to dish out a lot of damage against inexperienced players.
Still, it's a fun game if you're a Star Wars fan. Shooting through the forests of Endor on a Speeder Bike is nice and taking down an AT-AT with a harpoon cable is a difficult, but rewarding thrill. It's certainly nothing revolutionary, but fans of the genre will find a lot to like.
|
|
|
23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Unfinished, September 22, 2004
Fun:3.0 out of 5 stars
This game was clearly rushed out the door so they could sell it the same day the trilogy was released on DVD.
The multiplayer server brower is jittery and selecting a server to join is like playing whack-a-mole (but less fun). It's a simple interface issue, but it just wasn't tested completely.
The dedicated server software is incomplete. It sometimes hangs for no reason when changing maps. Administrators of the servers have no control over the servers once they are set to run.
The gold standard for this kind of game is Battlefield 1942. A Battlefield server has about 60 customizations and functions. Most of them can be accessed from within the game while the admin is playing. The Battlefront sever have 14 options and you can only change them at the server launch. There is no way to change the duration of the maps, no way for server admins to kick unruly players, no way to force a map change, no way to select which map hte server plays next.
The failure to design a robust and easily administered server ruins the multiplayer part of this game. Last night on my server, we had a player who walked his AT-ST up to a friendly spawn point and blasted his teammates as they spawned into the map. As a server admin, I was powerless to stop this teamkilling because there is no kick function.
The single player game has its own problems. Chiefly, the bot AI is as dumb as a stone (this was also a problem with the Battlefield 1942 single player game). It kills any replayability in single player mode.
It's not all bad. The graphics are superb and the sound is cool. Once you get on the server you want, the game is going and you have a good group of players, it's a lot of fun. At least until the server hangs on a map change.
The game as it was released on 9/21/2004 is worthy of a "beta" label. It has the promise of one day being a great game is Lucasarts chooses to complete it with downloadable patches.
If you're considering buying this, I'd check to see if there has been a patch or two released my Lucasarts.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
