Star Wars: Battlefront II

Genre:	Third-Person Action
Developer:	Pandemic Studios
Publisher:	LucasArts
Release Date:	31 October 2005
Released On:	PS2, Xbox, PC

Amazing Ben Describes the Plot in 10 Words or Less: 

Serve as an infantryman in every Star Wars battle ever.

Overview: 

Battlefront is everything you could possibly want out of any Star Wars game not called Knights of the Old Republic.  The premise is simple - you take the role of a regular soldier and fight out all the greatest battles of the Galactic Rebellion and the Clone Wars.

The best thing about this game is the sheer scope of it, and the fact that you as a person are almost completely insignificant to the outcome of the battle.  Instead of playing as some super-human motherfucker, you are just some jackass Stormtrooper or Rebel Soldier running through the Forests of Endor trying desperately to avoid getting shot in the eye by a blaster rifle or having some random Jedi run up and jam a lightsaber into your ballsack.  You have the same amount of health as every other soldier out there, and have basically two attacks - shoot and throw grenades.  You can also hop in all sorts of crazy ass contraptions ranging from laser turrets and speeder bikes to those huge fucking four-legged walkers from The Empire Strikes Back and a couple of Clone War-era tank things that may or may not have ever shown up in any of the movies.  Basically you spawn, you run around, you kill everything in sight, and then you die.  A lot.

Essentially, both sides start each map with a set number of soldiers (maybe about fifty for each side) and a set number of "reserves" (usually around 150).  Each time a player (NPC or human-controlled) dies and respawns, the reserve count decreases by one.  So ultimately the goal is to be the first team to net 200 kills.  However, to add another layer to the mindless slaughter each map is broken up into eight "spawn points".  Each side begins in control of two spawn points, with four being neutral, and it's each side's goal to control as many of these points as possible.  If at any point you control more spawn points than your enemy, his reserves number will begin to go down on its own.  If you capture every spawn point on the map, you win.  This sounds pretty simplistic, and ultimately it is.  However, it is also fucking awesome.  Each spawn point basically becomes a fucking insane-o warzone as like sixty dudes are running around blasting everything in sight and lobbing grenades all over the place.  Seriously, the computer-controlled dudes are balls to the wall all the time.  Plus it gets a lot of leeway based on the fact that it's Star Wars, which is such a powerful IP that it allows you to overlook quite a few shortcomings in the gameplay department.

Now there are four factions you can play as - the Galactic Empire, the Rebel Alliance, the Clone Republic, and the Droid Trade Federation.  In addition, each faction has a number of different types of soldiers at its disposal, meaning each faction plays a little differently.  You start off as a basic Stormtrooper-style infantryman, but as you score kills and accrue points during the battle you gain the ability to respawn as a number of different types of specialists, ranging from snipers and heavy weapons troops to commanders and engineers, each one with it's own special abilities, weapons, and powers.  Best of all is when you're really whipping asses all over the place you get the opportunity to play as a Hero, which puts you in the shoes of dudes like Darth Vader, The Emperor, Han Solo, and Luke Skywalker - guys with INSANE amounts of health and fucking uber-powerful weapons that allow you to fuck shit up all over the place.

Just in case it's not enough for you that you fight every major land battle from the movies (plus some I've never heard of before), there are also space battles.  It's a similar concept - both sides start off with a capital ship and the goal is to destroy the other ship while protecting your own.  What's badass is that there are a couple of ways to do this:  You can hop in an X-Wing and start launching torpedoes at the Star Destroyer's shield systems, or you can load a bunch of troops into a transport ship, board the enemy vessel, and destroy it from the inside by launching rockets at the engines or whizzing on the bridge controls.  The ship combat is a total blast.  Sure, it's still a far cry from X-Wing or TIE Fighter or X-Wing Vs. TIE Fighter or TIE Fighter Vs. X-Wing or X-Wing Vs. TIE Fighter Vs. Millennium Falcon Vs. Space Godzilla, but the sheer number of ships you can pilot and the quality of the ship combat is still very nice.  You can also man your battleship's turbolaser turret defenses and try and shoot down enemy fighters from the safety of the control room.

There are three modes to the game that are worth playing.  The first is the campaign "story" mode, where you start off as part of some jackass Clone trooper brigade and which takes you more or less from the Clone Wars through the Battle of Hoth.  It's not great, but there are some very interesting battles that make it worth a play-through.  I particularly enjoy the mission where your crew has to go in and take out the Jedi Council.  There's nothing quite like watching thirty of your teammates get hacked to pieces by three Jedis, who then proceed to throw their lightsabers at you before you even have a chance to soil your armor.

The second mode is called "Galactic Conquest", which is where I usually spend most of my time.  You decide whether you want to fight the Clone Wars or the Galactic Rebellion, and then you go about conquering the galaxy Risk-style.  There's a huge strategic map where you do a little bit of simple troop movement and resource management, and once battle is initiated it takes you right into the action.  It's pretty dope.

The third mode just lets you fight out random battles on a map-by-map basis, which is also pretty cool.  You can pick the boards, the teams, and can customize a couple of other options.  This is the only mode you can access if you're trying to play with more than two players.

X-Tremeness Level: 

The dude from Return of the Jedi who drinks a two-liter bottle of Red Bull, flips out and crashes his A-Wing into the bridge of the Imperial Super Star Destroyer Executor while screaming "cowabunga!" at the top of his lungs during the Battle of Endor.

OR

The Stormtrooper who shows up to his post drunk and then bonks his head on the door of the Death Star.

Overall Badassitude Score: 

Few things in the world are more satisfying than stomping asses through the Dagobah Swamp as Darth Vader, coming face-to-face with a rebel soldier who is being controlled by one of your friends, Force Choking the shit out of them for two full seconds until they are almost dead, and then cutting them down with an authoritative swing of your lightsaber while your friend screams in agony.  It's better than sex with anyone not named Hot Andrea.

        

SCORE:  5 out of a possible 5 Fully-Operational Death Stars.

Addictiveness: 

RATING:  Ruling the galaxy with an iron fist.

I think in the first week I owned this game Tom and I conquered the Galaxy about twenty times.  It might not sound like it from my crappy description, but this game is the fucking bee's nuts.  There are a huge number of maps, a bunch of different character classes to try out, and the feeling that you're in the middle of an epic sci-fi battle is hard to beat.  There's really nothing quite like taking down a walker or shooting Boba Fett in the face with a tank.

Multiplayer Component: 

You can play the Campaign and the Galactic Conquest modes split-screen co-op with 2 players.  It supports up to 4 people on one Xbox if you play vs. maps, and has connectivity through System Link and Xbox Live.

Hot Andrea's Take: 

"You're such a fucking nerd."

Awesometer Score: 

+6

I thought this game was fucking awesome.  I can't really give it higher than a +5 considering that there really isn't a whole lot to it other than running around killing things over and over and over again, but it's really a pretty brilliant formula, and feeling like you're in the middle of a gigantic intergalactic struggle is really fucking rad.