“Take a legion” – Star Wars: Battlefront

Amidst the year of sequels, Star Wars: Battlefront still provides something of a first in the list of UK #1 games. Online multiplayer has been a prominent component of several I’ve already played, most notably SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals. But that still had a separately designed single player campaign with a different gameplay approach. With broadband access spreading fast, Star Wars: Battlefront marks the point when online multiplayer could completely take central stage, with the single player modes essentially consisting of playing the multiplayer against AI.

Following on from games like Battlefield: 1942, Star Wars: Battlefront is a battle simulator with a lot of moving parts. Two warring sides (and sometimes more) battle it out to kill each other and stake their claim to territory. You step into it as a soldier and play your part from third-person or first-person view, using various weaponry and commandeering vehicles to help you on the way. If you get killed, you respawn as a different solider at one of your side’s command posts and set off again. With hundreds of active soldiers on each side, it’s the scale that’s most immediately impressive and new.

It’s not the first time that a new concept has had one of its first times at the top of the charts attached to Star Wars. Its versatility as a video game setting had been long-established already. But Battlefront is one of the most effective examples of all. Other games were doing similar things with World War II or Vietnam, but how much better to do it with famous Star Wars battles? Pandemic and LucasArts could build on decades of cultural resonance in a pretty similar way, but freed of many of the constraints of taste and realism.

The result is that they can do battle as a sport without it jarring. The scores for red and green teams, in numbers of soldiers available, are displayed at the top of the screen throughout. Each battlefield has command posts that you seize by hanging out next to them until their colour changes to your team’s. Where Doom reminded me of playing laser tag in its atmosphere, Battlefront reminds me of its format in totality, except that you couldn’t fit hundreds of kids or a full-scale fortress into Planet Laser. You even end each battle with a print-out of stats for you and your team so you can find out that it was Red 5 who kept hitting you. And all of that combines with the Star Wars setting.

Levels come introduced with clips from the movies, building on them in an even more straightforward way than past Star Wars games (and highlighting how the prequel trilogy sequences look at least as dated as the original ones at this point). I can sense that if these were films I cared about more it would be incredible to be thrust into their battlefields and move around taking in much more than the films could show. Zipping from battling on foot to piloting a flyer to acting as its gunner is exciting regardless. And amidst all the nameless grunts you get the occasional appearance from the stars too, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader hacking their way through the masses. On the downside, you don’t get to play as them, but on the upside there is no gambling-based metagame in which you can earn the right to play as them.

The presence of such decisive figures, though, does highlight one of the flaws of single-player especially. That is, the sense of scale comes hand-in-hand with a frequent feeling that you aren’t actually doing much. Don’t choose to spawn and you can watch the battle play out without you, a series of different coloured icons moving around on a map, deciding things among themselves. There may be battles where you, say, contribute to taking out a couple of clumsily trapped AT-ATs and can easily see how significant it is to the wider effort, but more often you’ll have been taking marginal gains at most. And making a marginal contribution alongside a team of AIs against another team of AIs isn’t very exciting.

If Battlefront takes after sport, it’s more in the pre-association forms of football played between one village and another as biting and gouging brawls. But in those, even if you never touched the ball, you would know your fellow villagers and be able to take pride in their victory. The closest Battlefront can get to that feeling is by leaning on love for Star Wars to pick up the slack. Which was again shown to be a pretty safe bet for a lot of players.

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Top of the charts for week ending 2 October 2004:

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