Star Wars Battlefront 2 PS4 Review: "Be disappointed, you will."

Star Wars Battlefront 2 Ps4 Review

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Patch Version:  1.18

Star Wars has a place in a lot people hearts.  It’s one of a few franchises that excites its fans the second they see or hear anything that is related.  So when Star Wars Battlefront was first announced I was excited, not because I'm a super fan, but because, having seen some gameplay it looked truly promising, until, that is, I found out it didn’t have a single player campaign.

This was a huge disappointment to me, and in truth, I only bought and played it because my friends were playing it.  I’m not a massive fan of PVP anymore.

BUT… when Star Wars Battlefront 2 was announced AND was going to include a single player campaign, I was 100% on board.

Having chosen the difficulty, of which there are three to choose from: explorer, soldier and special forces – I chose soldier and loaded in.

It starts really promisingly with a cinematic scene of our character, Commander Iden Versio of the Empire’s Inferno Squad being questioned by the Rebel Alliance having been captured.   Having just reviewed Mass Effect Andromeda, I’m pleased to see some decent facial animations in SWBF2, in fact, it’s very impressive; you can literally see the contempt Iden has on her face whilst she’s being interrogated.  The lip syncing isn’t perfect, but it's good enough not to be distracting, and to be fair, better than a lot of other titles.

Before long we gain control, but instead of controlling Iden, we get to fly her droid.  This being our first mission: to rescue her from her cell.

Graphically, the game is amazing, then again, so was the last Battlefront, but I’m surprised by how smooth and responsive controlling the droid is.  I’m enjoying myself immensely as I work my way through the ship by interacting with vents and slowly creeping up on guards and stunning them with the droid's weapon.  Not to sound like the Outer Limits, but you have full control over the horizontal as well as the vertical in relation to directional movement.  It’s great!

Eventually you reach Iden and set her free, where upon you switch to her and your true purpose aboard the ship comes to light.  Before that though, let me just say how mesmerized I was with the subtle touches of this transition.  The animation of your droid attaching itself to Iden’s back and the cutscene transitioning to gameplay is a testament to polish.  The droid even becomes one of Iden’s triggerable abilities, allowing you to scan the area for threats or to shock enemies whenever the ability is charged.

Movement is one dimensional now, obviously, since Iden can’t fly, but I’m instructed to creep up on my first victim and take them out stealthily.  I wasn’t expecting this in truth and I remember thinking ‘GREAT!’ as I crept up and grabbed him from behind and choked him out all silent like.  Stealth Mechanics, colour me surprised!

However, I’m a little saddened by there being no body management system, so I just leave the guard’s body in full view where he fell and move on.  To be fair though, very few games bother with such systems now anyways unless they are hard core stealth games, too much work I guess, and if Battlefront 2 isn’t a stealth game I can understand them not wanting to do it.  It was just a shame is all; it would have been nice.

All of this by the way has been played in 3^rd person, but changing to 1^st is as easy as holding down the d-pad down button, and repeating this will switch you back.  You can even control the camera’s left or right over the shoulder orientation when in 3^rd person too by pressing the down d-pad once opposed to holding it.

When I reach the second group of enemies, however, something interesting happens. I creep up on the first to stealth choke them before tackling the second, but having gotten close enough to do it, when the takedown prompt shows up, instead of performing the silent choke move I did earlier, I perform some loud beat down attack that alerts the nearby guard to my presence.  Had I done something wrong?  Is there a subtle press and hold for a silent takedown and a quick press for a more brutally loud one, akin to Deux Ex’s takedown system for example?  No, it turns out, and having done a little experimenting, my best guess is the first choke move I saw was scripted.  This definitely isn’t a stealth game that much now proven.

Before long I get my first taste of gunplay.  I try it out in both 1^st and 3^rd perspectives.  Both are fine, so whatever your preference you won’t feel hindered.   

Differently to most shooters though, SWBF2 doesn’t rely on ammo.  Instead, your weapons have a heat cycle.  If you fire it for too long it will overheat and need to cooldown before you can fire it again.  You can simulate a reloaded type of action though; effectively cooling you gun down before this happens by pressing the square button, which triggers the cooling cycle early. 

However, as the sound of laser’s being fired start flying over my head, I instinctively run for cover only to discover there’s no cover mechanics.  No leaning or peeking.  You can’t even shoot from behind cover smoothly when trying to ADS.

If you want to take cover, you have to crouch behind something.  If you want to shoot, you have to stand up and fire.  This felt really dated and cheap!  But before I can ponder this for too long a grenade lands by my feet and I attempt to roll away only to discover I can’t!  It doesn’t kill me, but it was very confusing not having a way to evade or dodge.

Quickly I pause to check the controls. I knew it was possible; you could roll in the first Battlefront, and sure enough the control menu suggests it is still a feature in Battlefront 2.  So I return to gameplay and try again.  Nope.  I cannot roll.  Was this a bug? It can’t be!  No way would they release or miss a bug like this!  A little internet sleuthing later and it turns out that it’s not a bug and Iden cannot perform this action. What?!  

I was shocked by this omission. How are you supposed to evade incoming fire and explosives with no roll mechanic, let alone no cover system!

Bewildered and quite frankly annoyed, I press on.  Fighting the enemies though is half decent.  A shot to the head will instantly kill them making it feel realistic opposed to them being bullet sponges, whereas bodies shots take a little more time to drop them.  They also seem to use cover, and frustratingly can fire around and over it.  Something I cannot do and every time I see them performing this action it serves as a stinging reminded.

Having cleared the room, I move to a few bodies to see if there is anything to loot.  Nope, what is more, or less in this case, I also notice that the dead rebels have no laser scorch decals on their bodies.  Where is the polish I briefly talked about earlier?

Around twenty minutes later I reach the end of the level and it cuts to a rather cool cutscenes of my escape.

I’m not exactly sure what I just experienced.  Perhaps it’s starting out slowly?  You know, easing me in before I’m inundated with a plethora of skills, abilities and mechanics to make this empty experience not feel so hollow.

Don’t misunderstand, the story so far is good, and experiencing things from the perspective of the empire is great, not to mention the cutscenes and voice acting so far has been top notch, but there must be more to combat than this basic bowling alley shooter.  I still have hope, it’s early, and apparently, rebellions are built on it, so I load through to the next mission expecting greater.

Initial Score after 2 hrs of play

Full Playthrough Score after 6 hrs of play

Overall Impression

Having now completed Star Wars Battlefront 2’s campaign, an endeavour that took me a paltry 6 hours to do, I’d like to say it was an experience that changed my opinion of it. 

Sadly, all the issues and missing features I raised in the initial impressions segment of this review were not addressed or remedied.  I’ve never played such a high profile title with so little effort having been implemented.  It’s like they really didn’t want to do it and were forced to do it!  It’s shocking really, that this is what they thought was good enough to pass as a single player campaign game?

In all fairness though, Star Wars Battlefront is a PVP game at heart, so perhaps my expectations for a fully fleshed out single player campaign with all the bells and whistles that typical games have were a little naive.  HOWEVER, if I’m told a game has a single player campaign, I expect a single player campaign; this might has well been on rails!

This is where I become conflicted, why? Well, the story is actually not half bad, and the quality of the cinematics and the dialog is well scripted.  The voice acting is equally impressive, don’t get me wrong, it lacks authenticity when it comes to certain key characters that you know and love, such as Leia, Luke and Han Solo to name but a few of the people you will meet on your travels, but on the whole it’s close enough  that you can’t  really complain.  In fact, Lando’s wasn’t bad at all, and Maz’s was actually quite close.

In fact, my only complaints about the story was that it was over too quickly, and the switch from the dark to the light was too obvious.  So obvious I don’t even classify it as a spoiler; the foreshadowing leading up to it is blatantly transparent.  I only tell you because I don’t want you to be as disappointed as I was.  I much would have preferred to have continued playing the game on the empire’s side than switching, at the very least, played on the side of the empires for a little longer.

Still, overall, the story is solid and far better than a lot of games I’ve played.  You’ll visit a lot of locations whilst playing through its 13 missions, but hardly spend much time on each.  You do play as a whole host of your favourite characters, fly, both rebel and empire ships, swing a lightsabre or two, and even control some two legged and four legged machinery that I'm sure I don't have to mention by name.  So in that regard it is fun and I’m sure fans will get a kick out of it.

But, for everyone else who likes to get their money’s worth when they purchase a computer game for a campaign experience, be disappointed, you will.

It lacks so much in the sense of features and systems that single player games have.  Such as no levelling for example, which also means no skills to unlock with points, instead, Star Wars Battlefront 2 uses a similar card system that the Multiplayer portion of the game uses that has both passive and active abilities.

You can equip three of these cards at any given time which overrides your character’s default loadout.  This was confusing at first because I didn’t realises it did this, so when I tried to activate Iden’s scanning ability only to discover that I couldn’t it caught me off guard.

This was more my fault than the games, I should have paid more attention when choosing my deck I guess, but still, losing this signature ability was odd.

There is a 4^th ability slot though, but you can only fill it by picking up certain in game weapons or tech devices on particular missions.  And when that mission is over, you will lose that item entirely.   

In regards to gunplay and the weapons you can use, there’s eight in total, and viewing their stats can be done via the loadout menu.  However, this is where another limitation hits because you can only alter your loadout and view this menu if you find the few and far between loadout crates.  The only other way to do it is to die, where upon you get a chance to alter your card setup along with your chosen weapon.

You do have in game opportunities to loot guns, but this comes at the price of swapping out your primary weapon for the new one, as you can only carry one at a time.  So unless you’ve chosen a card that has a different weapon relating to it for you to use as well, it feels rather weak in this regard, further adding to the lack of depth the gameplay has.

What's worse, is when you do find an in game weapon, there’s no comparison HUD element to suggest if it’s better than what you are currently using, so looting it seems like a gamble.

In regards to the card system, which is the loosely-woven replacement for a progression skill system in the campaign, there are 12 cards to unlock, which sounds a lot on paper, but when you factor in the aspect of only being able to equip three at a time, that 12 sounds less impressive.  And though you are not restricted in which you can assign, which was nice, if one doesn’t have an activated trait, the trigger able slot will house whatever is or was the default for said slot for the character you are playing. 

From a logically stance, I found it better to just assign passive cards when I could, and rely on the default skills opposed to swapping them out for something more useful, because the default ones were the most useful, which begs the question as to why these particular cards were chosen in the first place for campaign use.  I can guess the reason; they were just recycled aspects from the multiplayer side, further highlighting to me that the single player campaign was not really taken seriously.

The activated traits don’t share cooldowns though, and also vary in their cooldown durations, so in that regard at least it isn’t restrictive, but overall, the system lacks any thought whatsoever to distinguish itself as a standalone campaign experience and it shows.

Once you do complete the game, you'll be able to continue the story and play the free Resurrection mission that is set decades later in the era of the first order.  I liked how it followed directly on from the main campaign, however, it’s only three missions long and takes around an hour to complete and suffers from the same lack of systems that plagues the main campaign.

Once you do complete the story modes though, you’ll be able to replay any mission you wish, as to why I’m not sure, but the function is there so I will mention it.  One slim motive for this though is any mission where you play as Iden, and have access to her droid, you’ll find hidden metal boxes scattered in the levels.  There are 23 in total, and unlocking them will grant you a collectable and gift crafting materials, which feeds into the multiplayer side of the game.  So if you don’t play that or are not interested in it, collecting them is pointless.   Reinforcing that sentence is the fact there is no achievement for finding and collecting them all too.  Again, a lack of effort in relation to the single player side.

In regards to the game’s three difficulty settings, you might as well play it on the easiest if you just want to quickly enjoy the story.  If you do want a challenge, you can choose the other settings if you wish, which I recommend solider, but it seems that all the difficulty does is make you easier to kill, which, if you count up the missing features such as cover and evade mechanics, will just end up frustrating the hell out of you on certain missions where these features would have come in really handy.  If that’s something you think you’ll enjoy, cool, but don’t say I didn’t warn you if it isn’t.

As for the enemies classes, there are four types that I could tell on both sides.   Melee rushes, that function as their name suggests.  Standard, that will basically fire at you from cover, and to be fair will stay ducked down if you keep them suppressed, else they will fire over and around, which is something I mentioned in the initial segment of this review as annoying, primarily because you, yourself, have no cover mechanics.  As for the heavies, they are walking tanks, who will fire large blaster cannons and just slowly walk towards you, and lastly officers, who are like standard types, only they will buff others in various ways.  

Again, it all felt really basic.  At least it's in keeping with the rest of the campaign experience.  So it attains points for consistency.

Bug wise, I hardly encountered any worth mentioning; commendable.  Saying that though, when the game is missing practically everything that makes a game a game, is the lack of bugs really that surprising?

It’s a shame really; Start Wars Battlefront 2 starts out really strong but then shows its limitations and wants exceedingly quickly, and calling it a campaign experience does an injustice to developers that make real campaign games.  If it wasn’t for the story, the cutscenes and voice acting, it would have been a total utter waste of my time playing through it.  In some ways, it reminded me of The Order 1886, only that game was what I called the most photorealistic experience I have ever encountered, and though STBF2 is impressive from graphically point of view, it comes close to the graphical prowess of The Order 1886, but not close enough.

Don’t misunderstand me, Star Wars Battlefront 2 is a very pretty shooter, sure, and the environments and level design is good, but once you scrape through that pretty makeup you are left with a rather ugly experience that seems to have been created as if the story was written and the gameplay just slotted in as an afterthought, with very little time to flesh it out with system and mechanics that would have given it more depth.

Ultimately though it lacks so much of what a single player campaign game should be and is over before you know it.  The only interesting aspect about it really is seeing things from the empire's perspective, but even that ends too quickly, so much so, that I truly feel angry for anyone who bought it on release solely to experience the single player campaign.

If you are thinking of buying this Star Wars Battlefront 2 for a decent, fleshed out campaign… save your money; it’s got a couple of bells but absolutely ZERO whistles and was absolutely not worth the price of admission.

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