Early Impressions From The Star Wars Battlefront Beta

After years in the gaming and film wilderness of mediocrity – too many years in both instances – Star Wars is back, and it’s back in a big way. Star Wars Battlefront sees DICE get their hands on a lapsed game series which, let’s be honest, was heavily indebted to their Battlefield games in the first place, and with just over a month before launch, players can get their hands on the open beta as of today.

Three game modes – two competitive and one solo/co-operative – are spread across three maps from the full game’s twelve, with a handful of weapons and abilities to unlock and try out of the course of the beta period.

The headline game mode, Walker Assault, is the largest of the lot, with two teams of 20 players going head to head, as the Empire assaults the Rebel base on Hoth in the beta. The best comparison would be to Battlefield’s Rush game mode, but it does a few things to twist that mode into something new. Instead of the Empire needing to blitz two points on the map and destroy them, they’re actually working to stop the Rebels from holding onto a pair of uplink stations that are used to call in Y-Wing bombers that attack the two AT-ATs stomping their way through the map.

Even though there’s not as many players on the map as in Battlefield, it’s really no less hectic, thanks to the players being funnelled towards two clear objectives, the plethora of abilities and weapons such as large energy shield domes and rocket launchers being picked up and people hopping into vehicles and turrets.

You really do need to get to grips with the game a bit before diving in – if you’ve not ranked up and unlocked a few guns and abilities beforehand, the game pops a little warning advising you to do so – but even then, there’s a lot to take in an a lot that will be missed on first inspection. It will take experience and a bit of luck to be in the right place at the right time in order to step into the boots of Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker, for example, and there’s a whole layer of air combat between AT-ATs, TIE Interceptors, Y-Wings and Snowspeeders that you can be blissfully unaware of if you don’t take part in it.

Perhaps because of this, it currently feels very easy for the Empire to just march towards a win against an uncoordinated, inexperienced and scrappy Rebel team, who can’t hold down the uplink points and don’t understand how to damage the two AT-ATs coming their way. However, there’s also less inherent teamwork since squads have been reduced down to pairs of buddies. You can either spawn back at the main spawn point or on your buddy, but without squads of four or five and being able to pick who to spawn on, you’re much less able to hold down a single position with a small group, and that changes some of the flow of the game.

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The vast majority of the game will be spent ground pounding as a regular soldier, and that’s emphasised in the Drop Zone game mode. It’s a smaller scale affair at just 8v8, but as escape pods drop at random points amidst the volcanic rocky outcrops that make up the map, the battle can quickly shift back and forth in the race to capture five pods.

This is really the training ground, and over the course of the first few matches you unlock new guns and abilities to put in your “hand”. First it’s the Thermal Detonator grenade, then the Ion Shot mode for your primary weapon that’s more damaging to vehicles – and therefore not particularly useful in the soldier-only Drop Zone – the Cycler Rifle as a cooldown-based sniper, Jump Pack, Personal Shield and more.

But you can get a hang of the first person combat and the weapons a lot better in this closer quarters situation, or playing the horde mode Survival on Tatooine against AI enemies. There’s really not much recoil to either of the default blaster rifles, but they’re still not that great at long range and require you to land several hits for a kill. You can still hit people and deal damage from quite a distance, but you’re much better off switching to the Cycler Rifle for a single shot or trying to close the gap. While a big deal was made about not having “aim down ironsights”, both the A280C and E-11 have a scope attached which you can very quickly look down, which effectively negates that point.

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Though it’s a shame that DICE still haven’t been able to get up to 1080p on the PS4, the game still looks quite stunning. The snowscape of Hoth, the steaming black rocks and sulphuric quagmire of Sullust and the familiar brown rocks of Tatooine are all absolutely gorgeous and feel so utterly faithful to the look and style of the films which inspired them.

Most importantly, where my previous experience with the game – an all too brief go on Fighter Squadron – left me rather unsatisfied, this beta does a lot to make me want to play more and explore more layers of the gameplay. I’ve yet to unlock all of the abilities, I haven’t been Darth Vader, I’ve not driven an AT-AT, flown a Snowspeeder or successfully defended the Rebel base on Hoth, but I want to keep playing and do all those things.

18 Comments

  1. Great little preview… Now wish it was ready to download on the store!!!

      • Groovy stuff, if only i had left my PS4 in standby! The file size doesn’t show up on the store – anyone know how large it is?

      • Just over 7GB

      • Thanks, hopefully my newly upgraded broadband will allow me to try it tonight.

      • Thanks for the link Tony! See you all in five hours for some peow peow don’t get cocky kid!

    • It is. Search for Battlefront & the Beta should pop up. :)

      • Or better still, click on Tony’s link.

      • The remaining 92 minutes waiting for it to finish downloading is far too long. I might go outside and shout at my phoneline coming in to my house or get my wife’s hairdryer on the router to warm it up and hopefully it’ll speed up a little. Come on!

      • Could be worse.

        I need to wait until after the Burnout Paradise meet I’ve arranged tomorrow evening starting at 9pm.

        If I’m very lucky, I might be able to sneak a shot in later – i’m guessing it doesn’t support remote play yet?

  2. Completely forgot the beta started today until I saw this. Got it on download and should be ready for tonight, I’m hoping it will be an even better Battlefront/Battlefront 2 but I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up being something else with a Star Wars skin.

  3. better than my expectations..
    graphically superior on the ps4 as opposed to xbone.
    the hoth battle is spawn,die,respawn,redie if you are lucky enough to leg it before you die you might be able to get off a few shots.
    the cqb map is bit more personal.
    so far i have flown a tie fighter(really badly)
    been luke skywalker and sabered a group of stormtroopers.
    and had a little go in the wealkers..no atat yet.
    for me the thing that truly shines is the sound effects,authentic blaster noises mechanical sounds when you are close to an atat and the buzz of tie fighter whizzing past..Bang On!
    guessing this is pretty much the final product?
    needs a few tweaks like weapon balancing but no doubt we will see many a patch after launch.

  4. Oh damn, just realised this junk of a machine didn’t start downloading the beta, although I added it to my download list on the mobile.
    How far are we still off from halfway reliable technology in 2015..???
    Grrrr…. waiting…

  5. Played a couple of games on Hoth.The look and feel of the map is spot on, the sound design is great but I found the gameplay to be a bit flat. Maybe I need a few more games to get used to it but I don’t like the map layout; yes it looks great as I said above but its far too open for me to enjoy, I just get picked off from a distance all the time.

    The air combat was tricky to begin with too, didn’t really know what I was doing but got the hang of it eventually…right before being blown out of the sky!

    Don’t think I’ll buy this on day one but sure i’ll get it eventually.

  6. Played the single player wave thing and the multiplayer volcanic one. Enjoyed both. Need to rank up a bit before trying out the snow level.

  7. Just started downloading. 13 minutes.

  8. Brilliant! Best beta (pff, demo) I’ve ever played! This is what Star Wars is all about.

  9. The visuals are pretty dam good, but I’m not too sure what to make of the gameplay.
    I came top out of 40 people on my first go, with about 40+ kills and only about 8 deaths, then on my second go, I came close to last and only managed to kill about 8 people with about 20 deaths.

    It’s certainly different to Battlefield – More user friendly, but less tactical. I think the casual gamer could just jump in and end up with either a huge amount of kills or deaths depending on how lucky they are. I found the objectives were just being ignored by everyone resulting in just mass firefights.

    No one seems to have mentioned the auto aim assist either which I found takes a lot of the skill away. After spending about 3hrs on the beta, I jumped onto Battlefield 4 and got my arse well and truly kicked!

    I did kind of enjoy it but I don’t know how long it will keep me interested as I think squads and teamwork etc seem to go straight out the window.

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