Jason, Eric, and I were lucky enough to give Star Wars: Battlefront a try in 2 player split screen cooperative play at E3 this year. First thing is, holy shit this game is gorgeous. It is a truly beautiful game in it’s pre-alpha state and ran really well on the PS4 we sampled it on. Unlike some console games that were actually running on a PC (We did see Below in the Xbox booth, with an Xbox One sitting in front of it, crash to the Windows screen), this was actually playing on the PS4, as in Jason’s play session it did crash to the PS4 home screen.
I got to play with Eric, and played as Rebels, as that was the only option for us. We could change our loadouts, and I choose to use the LMG. We could choose what weapon you could carry and what set of cards you had. Each person has 3 cards, or abilities that they can use. The load out I had included an anti armor weapon, over shield, and a jump jet. We fought off 6 waves of Imperials, two of those waves included AT-ST walkers which required us to switch to our anti armor weapon in order to take them down.
The Frostbite engine and what DICE has done with it here are truly amazing. I remember a time when watching CGI intro and cutscenes and imagining a day when technology would reach the point where that was actual gameplay. It seems like that day is here, if not already past that time. The desert map we played on looked fantastic. It looked better than George Lucas’s CGI in Episodes I-III.
Okay, enough about how amazing it looks, lets get into how the battle went down. The first wave of attackers had 5 enemies for us to defeat, and got harder from there. The third wave is where the first AT-ST showed up, all by itself, with the second and final AT-ST showing up in the final wave with a lot of storm troopers who apparently learned how to shoot (movie jokes). In addition to fighting off waves, escape pods were crash land on the map in which we had to secure, and then defend.
I look forward to my next chance to play Battlefront and see how the chaotic battlefield is when you have 20 v. 20, rather than just two people fighting off AI waves. The one negative was that the weapons didn’t seem all that satisfying to shoot. An exploding AT-ST was satisfying, but shooting it didn’t quite have much impact to it. Using the LMG, you would expect a lot of recoil, but there simply wasn’t very much. It’s still a very good game, and definitely one to keep an eye on.