“Space over Tatooine” – Star Wars: Battlefront II

Any questions about the rapid speed of the release this sequel are answered by the bubble on the back of the box proclaiming it the follow-up to the best-selling Star Wars game ever. Considering the competition, that’s quite the feat. Add to that the lesson which is going to be coming up with increasing regularity, that an audience of online players wanting to be part of the current thing can power yearly updates like little else, and there’s a slam dunk. That just leaves the minor question of what to do in a sequel to a game which did so much already.

Star Wars: Battlefront had, after all, already covered battle scenes from across the original and prequel trilogies. One bit of timing gave something to its sequel, in that there was now one more film to draw on for some Coruscant action among others, but that wasn’t much in itself. The response for Battlefront II was to not even try for a similar range of battles and associated cutscenes, and instead to find novelty in changing its scale.

A short while before the original, a game called Katamari Damacy had come out on the PS2, albeit not for us Brits (I played its sequel a bit later). In the Katamari games you push a sticky ball around, rolling it over stuff to pick it up. At certain points the ball grows in size and the scale shifts, with bigger objects now coming into your targets. You can eventually go from rolling over dominos on the floor to rolling up furniture, houses, continents, planets… and that switch in scale and perspective is always one of the greatest things it has to offer. Even a small version of the same thing in Madagascar won me over. It’s not something unique to video games, but adding the interactivity into it adds to the impression that there is a whole world at each of these scales, and whole worlds unseen even in the spots you don’t zoom in or out to.

I don’t know if Pandemic had Katamari Damacy in mind (probably not) but Battlefront captured that same excitement of jumping from person scale to giant war robot scale, and Battlefront II’s most impressive shift is in adding spaceship scale to the mix. There’s also a hint of Elite II: Frontier and especially Damocles in flying through space and then delving into action inside those ships, which is a reminder that it is a long way from new, but then, like Katamari, those games didn’t join that scaling onto laser tag warfare simulators. Or Star Wars. The other new thing that arrives with a certain inevitability is that rather than just seeing the big star turns from Darth Vader or whoever, you get to actually control them. The controls for light sabers are pretty limited, and yet even being Mace Windu is a fun experience that switches things up. Give the player a chance to swish a light saber around and you can’t go far wrong: another timeless lesson we will come across again.

That’s about it for the big changes, and it’s not much. Beyond that, with just one less exciting campaign available, I found myself going into Galactic Conquest mode (which was also in the original game), which takes the sports rulebook version of battle and adds board game into the mix, moving ships around a board interspersed with short battles. That has its own scale change to appreciate, in that the small settings for its battles largely fix the issue of feeling like your contribution to any given battle is pointless. The pressure to stay bought into keeping up with the latest Star Wars thing is not a great force. But if you are there, an excuse to go back and discover polished up versions of something underappreciated isn’t such a bad thing for a sequel to offer.

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Top of the charts for week ending 5 November 2005:

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