Star Wars Battlefront II: Is it Good Now? (2021 Update)

I bought this game in 2017 during a sale on Origin, thinking that it would be a great multiplayer experience, thinking it combines my two favorite things, shooting and Star Wars. I was so looking forward to shooting those little teddy bear creatures out of existence before the sad truth hits me.

It’s true how sometimes our judgment gets clouded with greed. I remember how EA was a dipshit publisher (still is to a certain extent). And seeing that one of their stupidly priced game ( for an Asian) is now on sale, I forgot to weigh in the “EA dipshit” factor into the equation of whether the discounted price is actually worth the purchase.

Turns out it wasn’t. I remember my first multiplayer game to be very strange. I was confused.

“What’s with the ping?”
“Is there no skill-based matchmaking?”
“What’s with the PING?”

Turns out being born in Malaysia, the unknown land between Singapore and Thailand brings its own set of challenges. For one, there are no local servers available. Not even Singapore. I had to join a Malaysian-based SWBF2 Facebook group so that we could muster enough players to play amongst each other and not shoved into a Japanese or US server, ruining the fun. Alas, it was a sad affair as we waited for the lobby to fill up with enough players, bantering about how shitty it feels trying to play this game. As someone who’s played various games over his lifetime, this didn’t make sense to me. If Dota 2 can have an adequate number of servers available around the world, why can’t a prominent game publisher do the same? It just didn’t add up. Then I remembered the publisher’s name.

“Oh, EA. Right. Dipshits.”

Then again, the game developer, DICE, is also known to make their games to have weird matchmaking experiences in the world. But I feel the lack of servers and the predatory nature of EA is the blow that killed the game eventually.

Needlessly to say, as my latency pinged into oblivion, I’ve given up on this game for good.

2021: New Beginnings

The pandemic happened. And there are more people stuck at home now. And naturally, gaming became a mainstream thing. Socially acceptable activity that is done to keep in touch and have fun during the lockdown period. And game companies took notice. We got games like COD: Warzone, World War Z, and also a bunch of free games from Epic Games that features a lot of older games. But hey, free is free. In one of its free game offerings, I saw a familiar game cover. My friend bought it to my attention and looking at the cover brought out my trauma. EA, Challenge Everything? More like EA, Ruin Everything? HA!

Although my zingers fell short to my gaming comrades, I’ve decided to hop on the optimism bandwagon, thinking that since it’s free, more people would play the game now. Turns out that was the case. So thus, begins my actual journey with Star Wars Battlefront II.

Review Starts Here

The first thing you need to know about the game: the currency on the top right doesn’t do shit. It’s just an array of numbers that don’t have actual value, even in-game. So don’t even think about it. The game features everything about Star Wars, only in a giant multiplayer format. Think of it as any Battlefield game, only with more lasers and lights sabers.

It features a couple of game modes and the most prominent one would be the Capital Supremacy mode. The main event so to speak. To put it simply, it’s a tug-of-war scenario where there are two phases of the game. You start with the ground assault and then to the main ship. If you win the ground war, you’ll be the attacking side where your main goal is to destroy the generator. Sounds simple enough, but nothing will prepare you for the unexpected time it takes to finish this game. If you’re lucky, you can finish this game within 20 minutes max. However, if your team decides that losing is not the way mid-defending and decides to throw their A-game, it’s back to the ground assault, and if you win that, you’ll be the one attacking the enemy’s ship. This will go on and on until one side’s ship is completely destroyed.

You get points for defending or capturing points, killing the enemy, and using your special abilities. With the points you accumulate, you can use it to use a special character in that round. You have special units from each faction and of course, the hero units. From Luke Skywalker to Darth Vader, you get to play a lot of the main characters that you find in the Star Wars universe, including the useless ones ( Phasma, I’m looking at you). However, just like you, most of us that play this game also want a go with the hero units, so you probably need to wait a while before you can get a chance to play.

There can’t be two Darth Vaders, duhhh! Why? Because…..realism, duh-doy!

Aside from that, the game is pretty fun. The aesthetics are pleasant, the game environment is pretty polished. I can’t get enough of that stormtrooper armor shine that is quite prominent in the game. Maybe use that armor polishing time to maybe target practice? That way, you probably could’ve exterminated the bunch of space rag-tags that took out an entire empire. The hero units are well made and the added special abilities to the heroes are amazing. Emperor Palpatine’s Dark Aura is a cool ability where a dark smoke that surrounds him will damage anyone who’s in it. Basically, a Sith Fart that is devastating to anyone in it. And they even featured his signature spin lunge as one of his moves.

Star Wars Battlefront 2 is a great experience. I had tons of fun with my friends and we’ve made Star Wars jokes along the way (mostly me). I get to say my favorites lines from the movies, using my favorite characters. Yelling “Rebel, scum!” with a condescending colonizer tone at the enemy is oddly satisfying. The sound design is great. From the sound of droidekas rolling around the battlefield to the ignition of a lightsaber, sound design is on point. Although it gets a bit loud sometimes. The game also features famous music pieces from the movies accompanying a certain hero unit. You’ll get the infamous Darth Vader theme as you slice and dice anything that moves. Play a character from the latest Star Wars trilogy, you get the accompanying theme music. Points for immersion.

The one inaccessible thing I’ve found in this game is getting upgrade information to unlock new weapons and loadouts for a specific class. The only way to do it is to remember how the attachment looks like and try looking for it in the Career tab. I can’t think of a more caveman thing in a game in the last decade or so playing video games.

But behind all the fun, there’s a somber feeling that I feel sometimes thinking that this game could’ve been so much more at its peak. It suffered immensely from the predatory monetization practices by EA and the zero efforts of making this game accessible to players from others in the world. The game has stopped updates since April 2020. However, the publisher, DICE will continue servers and game support duties for the game. The guardians of an expensive relic which is now on display for the public. Its time is coming soon once the initial excitement wears off. And I’ll remember the loneliness and the short excitement phases that I had with this game.

Thanks for the memories, I guess.