Star Wars: Battlefront II

Star Wars: Battlefront II came out recently. I thought something weird was going on, and tried to remember the last time I stepped into a time warp, but couldn't. For some reason, people were very angry at how this game has pay to win microtransactions. That's strange, because I don't remember those, nor did I remember it looking that pretty. Then I realized that it's another one of those rebooted "let's release new games with the same name as old" games. Unoriginal lowlifes! So let's review an old game with the same name as a new one!

Screenshot of a battle on Kashik

Remember that friend I mentioned in my last Star Wars review? When I started going over to his place for LAN parties, this was the original staple shooter. It was fun enough, but I didn't think it had enough tactical and strategic parts to it. If it does, it felt (and still feels) foreign and unknowable. By and large, it was mostly waves of hundreds of cannon fodder pawns on both sides.

The monotony is broken up a bit by the option of soldier classes: infantry, sniper, heavy, and engineer. A hundred or so AI bots populate the two teams. Mowing them down gets old fast. There are some pilotable vehicles, but I always ignored them, because I could never count on them being around in any given map. I never felt that it was worth getting good at something that might not be around. Despite it's science fiction veneer, Star Wars vehicles are slow. If the game deems you worthy, you have the opportunity to play as a hero, but in my experience, they don't seem to last long, despite the damage they deal and take. I would rather keep my godhood, thanks.

Screenshot of a battle in a library

The environments strike me as bland. Even discounting the flat graphics, the level design features big open spaces and narrow corridors. I'm not a fan of chest high walls, but always having cover nearby is useful. Outgoing fire is easily blocked by horrible collision detection on debris and cover, even if there is a clear line of sight to your intended target. I wasted countless rockets on the tops of stairs due to this!

Not long after, everyone had got FarCry. The environments were comfortable, unpopulated, and pretty, with lots of cover. Weapons felt powerful, and collision detection worked properly. I relished how much better FarCry felt, and didn't miss Battlefront 2 at all.

Since you've made it this far, you might be interested in reading:

Star Wars Republic Commando
This is the first Star Wars game I've ever played. I remember borrowing it from a friend about 10 years ago. Between him and his family, they probably had all the Star Wars games ever released up to that point.
Don't Preorder Games
Hi! You probably just read a message telling you to not preorder games. The following is an incomplete list of games that were terrible on release, and many who preordered them regretted it. You might have been one of them. Thanks to patch culture, some of these might be OK now, but you should not count on that for future releases. You already gave The Man your money, so why should he care? To him, you're just another sale in the quarter. So in the interest of learning from the past, let me remind you in chronological order:
StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void
This review has been a long time in coming. That makes sense, because this nicely concludes a story that began to be told almost two decades ago. Like the last review, I wanted this one some time bounce around my head, and it also feels like yanking off a stubborn band aid. I marathoned this series from its beginnings on the Twentieth Century through to the end of this. And to meditate on it even more, I did it again!
Age of Empires: Gold
Even though winter is a mostly no show right now, I still stayed indoors. I got the paid DLC for Witcher 3. I decided to have another strategy break, before heading into more labryinthine open world role playing. I wanted to take a retro trip with this, so I flipped the switch (several times) on Twentieth Century.
Darksiders
Do you have a game that you like playing it one hour, then despise it the next? And that's repeated ad nauseum? That's my general opinion on Darksiders. I'm cruising through it for a while, then a boss comes around, and I wipe about 10 times on it, making me want to stop playing. However, there's some addictive quality here that made me want to come back of my own accord. It wasn't just a desire to finish it, but curiosity to see what happened next.
Mass Effect: Andromeda
While I waited for this free month of EA games, I planned out how I would make the best of it. Since I've been wondering for years about what another Humble Origin Bundle would have, why not turn that into a playlist? Crysis 3 would be neat to play through, just to see how it ended. It turned out to be short enough to knock out in a weekend, so now what? Mass Effect: Andromeda would be a likely candidate, since it wasn't exactly a money maker for EA, so why not give it away?