Star Wars Battlefront (PC) review: Tons of sizzle, not much steak

What Battlefront gets right

Let's get the big question out of the way first: Star Wars: Battlefront does a better job of capturing the look, feel, and spectacle of battles in the Star Wars universe than any title ever has. Classic RPGs like Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel do a far better job of storytelling in the SWU, but if your childhood dreams involved more Death Star trench runs and fewer hours running through a swamp with Master Yoda, no previous game can match the eye-and-ear candy that Battlefront delivers.

If you've been a Star Wars fan since childhood, it's hard to move past the initial rush of seeing huge walkers lumber across the surface of Hoth or racing through Endor's forests on a landspeeder. Much has been said about the strategic disadvantage the Rebels suffer on Hoth; comparatively little has been written about the pounding the Empire takes on Endor. It turns out that being restricted to various flavors of bone-white armor creates a strategic disadvantage when battling Rebel troops in forest camo. Serves them right.

EA and Dice have built a variety of game modes, from standard death match (40-man Supremacy) to starfighter dogfights. There's a control point battle mode, a capture-the-flag clone (cargo hunt), and a point capture node that focuses on seizing droids rather than static points on the battlefield. There's even a Heroes vs. Villains mode that pitches two teams against each other, each with three "Hero" characters. The game rotates who plays as a hero in any given match, and non-heroes have the option to spawn as "Honor Guards" -- infantry-type classes with special abilities and more staying power compared to the heroes themselves. Finally, of course, there's the climatic, asymmetrical battle of Hoth, which needs no introduction. Walker Assault is clearly the game mode that received the most polish, and it shows -- big time.

Keeping it simple

Once the joy of playing in the ultimate Star Wars sandbox starts to wear off, you'll start to notice that the environments around you have all the dynamism of a matte painting. The X-Wing parked in Echo Base won't explode and the frozen tunnels that honeycomb the structure are impervious to thermal detonators. The total lack of terrain deformation or collapsible structures limits how players interact with the environment, especially when compared to Battlefield 3 or 4.

Dice's decision not to use classes make it easy to jump right into the action, but they also contribute to a nagging feeling of "sameness." There are a number of different blaster rifles and pistols to unlock, but they all tend to use similar sound effects and lack recoil. Battlefield 4 allows players to swap attachments between up to five hardpoints on various weapons. Battlefront has none of this.

The game does include a variety of unlockable gadgets and weapons (referred to as cards), but all of these require cooldown timers. In most shooters, choosing to play as a sniper means trading short-range survivability and limited situational awareness for the ability to kill people with a single bullet from halfway across the map. Battlefront equalizes this situation by giving anyone the ability to fire a sniper rifle once every 10-18 seconds depending on your level and upgrade state.

Unless you honed your sniping under Floyd Lawton (aka Deadshot), you probably aren't going to dominate a match firing one round every ten seconds, especially in a game as hectic as SWB. Your primary weapon, therefore, is a blaster pistol or a blaster rifle. While the game does offer "class" star cards of a sort that provide you with very specific benefits, like reduced explosion damage, these are only unlocked late in the game, require even more investment to unlock additional levels, and take up one of your three star card slots. They're not game changers, and they're clearly not intended to be.

The pros and cons of "simple"

Battlefront is clearly derived from Battlefield, and multiplayer Battlefield-style combat isn't a particular strength of mine. For that reason alone, I'm somewhat sympathetic to what Dice has tried to do here. Battlefield can feel overwhelming to a first-time player, especially if you're previous exposure to multiplayer has been a game like Team Fortress 2. Star Wars: Battlefront is simple and easy to dive into -- launch the game, click your game type, and boom, you're in -- there's less need to fine-tune loadouts or carefully choose weapon attachments. If your goal is to yank in new players looking for a nostalgic Star Wars experience, then Battlefront's simplified model is a smart move.

The problem with this approach is that it paradoxically offers players like myself fewer niches to work with. As a less-than-great Battlefield player, I typically choose to play an Engineer. I may not be great at tracking targets with an M-16, but I can patch up a tank, man a minigun, or handle a heavy machine gun from inside a tank. If we're getting hammered from the air, I can tackle enemy helicopters and jets with a javelin or AT4.

Vehicles in Battlefront, by contrast, are activated by power-up. While powerful, there are no opportunities to repair them, and no option to cooperate with teammates by manning multiple positions at the same time. Since vehicle power-ups are more-or-less randomly distributed across a map, it's difficult to use them in a sustained, strategic manner -- and there's really no room or place for a support-oriented mode. You can't load your rebel buddies into a troop transport or reinforce a choke point. Starfighters don't work well at all unless you're flying on the maps designed for them.

Performance

We've talked about how Battlefront scales down to 900p on the PS4 and just 720p on the Xbox One, compared to the PC's constant refresh rate. The fine folks at Guru3D(Opens in a new window) took a number of PC video cards out for performance testing and overall performance is excellent. Note that this is a DX11 title; EA and Dice apparently have no plans to implement DX12 support.

The Radeon Fury X is the fastest single GPU tested at 4K (all detail levels were set to Ultra), but the 980 Ti is faster in 1080p. The rest of AMD's product stack acquits itself very well; the R9 290X competes extremely well against the GTX 980. Gamers with lower-end cards will probably want to lower detail levels to improve frame rates -- there's some evidence that 2GB of RAM isn't enough memory above 1440p (the R9 380's 4K performance collapses, while multiple 3GB cards manage that resolution, even if it's not ideal).

The DLC question and verdict

EA has already announced that Battlefront will receive four DLC packages over the next year containing over 20 new items, 4 additional heroes and villains (two for each side would be our guess), 16 new maps, and four new game modes. Given how thin the existing title feels now, it's impossible to call this a good deal. I love Star Wars, and I love playing Battlefront for that reason -- but I don't love Battlefront enough to justify a $60 purchase. Nevertheless, I can still recommend it for someone who wants a simplified shooter that lets them jump in and start blasting, and doesn't mind the slog to unlock power-ups or the relative limited use-cases for those capabilities.

EA is charging $110 for the Battlefront season pass + base game, and I can't justify that, no matter what. It's unlikely that any new game modes or villains will actually fix the shallowness and limited replayability that dampen the current release -- paying for more content means getting more great-looking maps, but little else. For a company that claims it doesn't want to nickel-and-dime gamers, this feels exactly like getting nickel-and-dimed -- or quartered and dollared, if you prefer.