09-30-2004, 02:42 PM
For those of you interested in this game I put together this short Review.
First of all I love Star Wars (even though Episode I and II traded some of the athmosphere for stylish looks) so I got this game on release date and was realy looking forward to playing it.
So after 2 days of Single-Player and some days of online Multi-Player here are my impressions:
The story is, well, not existent, but that is not a real problem. Team-based strategy oriented Shooter do not realy need a story, do they?
There are basicaly two eras that you can play in: the Clonwar and the Galactic Rebellion so you get to play as Clones vs. Droids or Rebels vs. Imperium plus a few "neutral" enemys / allies.
Each side has their version of the four "standard" units (which are a basic soldier, a rocket-trooper, a sniper and a pilot) plus 2 "special" units.
The gameplay is very much like Battlefield 1942, so the goal is to gain control over as many spawnpoints as possible and decimate the credits of the opposing team.
Enough foreplay. Lets start with the good things:
-Looks: Just beautyful. The units are nicely rebuild from the Movies, especialy those imperial walkers are just great. The landscapes are also very nicely done. Ranging from more open maps to city streets there is a large variety of locations. One thing to point out is that on those maps that are covered with snow and ice the Rebel and Imperial Units are dressed accordingly.
-Sound: Oh wow, good job there. Even in software mode without effects the ears believe being in the middle of the Movies. Turn it to hardware mode with effects and a good set of headphones or a surround-sound set of speakers and this impression gets intesified. The blasters sound "realistic" as do the various vehicles and the voices are taken straight from the movies too.
So summing up the look and feel is realy authentic and fun.
Now to the down sides:
-Stability: There are massive reports of crashes, bad performance and the like. My own imporession is that some aspects of the 3D-engine are a little instable. For example the first Singleplayer Mission is to battle the Gungan army on the fields of Naboo. They have a large shield surrounding their primary spawn point (just like in Episode I) and they toss around tons of granades. This combo of effects seems to destabilize the engine as it regularly crashes to the desktop.
This is on a system featuring 1 GB RAM, an Athlon XP 3000+ and a ATI 9800 pro which is completely water-cooled and that has not crashed once during Doom 3 or any other high system-requirement game.
-Net-Code: Even on extremely low ping servers (<50ms) there are frequent lags and teleporting characters, which is realy annoying on maps that feature "neutral" enemies which are completely server controled (in other words, the comp knows where to aim but the players don't)
Being able to join servers seems to be a little random too...
-Manual: ridiculously little information leaving lots of controls and important issues to be discovered (for example weapon funcitons, side dodging and the like)
-Light-Sabers: While it is not the ONLY Weapon the Star Wars Universe needs it is somewhat frustrating having only the Computer controlled "Heros" use those. Puuduu!
As this game is a clear port of the Battlefield 1942 series it seems to be fair to compüare the two:
-Spawning-Interface: Badly done, when selecting the Character class one does not see how many of each type the team already has so more often then not the team is rather unbalanced (at least in public games that is) and even worse after selcting the spawn point and hitting join, the countdown to respawn starts on a different screen. This results in the bad side-effect that when the selected spawn-point is lost during this period you will spawn on the last selected one which could bring you to the most inappropriate place, like 30 Seconds away from the Battle.
-Sniper-Class: Problem is that almost every weapon has zooming ability and when only single shots are fired are almost as accurate as the sniper weapons but have a much larger clip and reserve ammunition as well as a faster rate of fire. Now the Sniper Rifle does have twice the zooming capeability it simplay lacks power.
Even a fully zoomed perfect headshot does not take down an enemy. One needs two hits at least. Bah, bad balance. Actualy makes me wonder if the game discriminates between different hit-zones at all.
All in all the game is fun to play but has some realy annoying downsides.
So I guess it is ok for Star Wars Fans while all others may like the Battlefield series more.
An alternative could be the Star Wars Mod for Battlefield...sort of like the best of both worlds (I guess that mod will increase in quality quite a bit after the modders have ripped some resources from Battlefront *g*)
Anyway, I hope this helps those interested in the game.
Have fun, I'm off to kick some Rebel-scum's Butt. :lol:
Dave
First of all I love Star Wars (even though Episode I and II traded some of the athmosphere for stylish looks) so I got this game on release date and was realy looking forward to playing it.
So after 2 days of Single-Player and some days of online Multi-Player here are my impressions:
The story is, well, not existent, but that is not a real problem. Team-based strategy oriented Shooter do not realy need a story, do they?
There are basicaly two eras that you can play in: the Clonwar and the Galactic Rebellion so you get to play as Clones vs. Droids or Rebels vs. Imperium plus a few "neutral" enemys / allies.
Each side has their version of the four "standard" units (which are a basic soldier, a rocket-trooper, a sniper and a pilot) plus 2 "special" units.
The gameplay is very much like Battlefield 1942, so the goal is to gain control over as many spawnpoints as possible and decimate the credits of the opposing team.
Enough foreplay. Lets start with the good things:
-Looks: Just beautyful. The units are nicely rebuild from the Movies, especialy those imperial walkers are just great. The landscapes are also very nicely done. Ranging from more open maps to city streets there is a large variety of locations. One thing to point out is that on those maps that are covered with snow and ice the Rebel and Imperial Units are dressed accordingly.
-Sound: Oh wow, good job there. Even in software mode without effects the ears believe being in the middle of the Movies. Turn it to hardware mode with effects and a good set of headphones or a surround-sound set of speakers and this impression gets intesified. The blasters sound "realistic" as do the various vehicles and the voices are taken straight from the movies too.
So summing up the look and feel is realy authentic and fun.
Now to the down sides:
-Stability: There are massive reports of crashes, bad performance and the like. My own imporession is that some aspects of the 3D-engine are a little instable. For example the first Singleplayer Mission is to battle the Gungan army on the fields of Naboo. They have a large shield surrounding their primary spawn point (just like in Episode I) and they toss around tons of granades. This combo of effects seems to destabilize the engine as it regularly crashes to the desktop.
This is on a system featuring 1 GB RAM, an Athlon XP 3000+ and a ATI 9800 pro which is completely water-cooled and that has not crashed once during Doom 3 or any other high system-requirement game.
-Net-Code: Even on extremely low ping servers (<50ms) there are frequent lags and teleporting characters, which is realy annoying on maps that feature "neutral" enemies which are completely server controled (in other words, the comp knows where to aim but the players don't)
Being able to join servers seems to be a little random too...
-Manual: ridiculously little information leaving lots of controls and important issues to be discovered (for example weapon funcitons, side dodging and the like)
-Light-Sabers: While it is not the ONLY Weapon the Star Wars Universe needs it is somewhat frustrating having only the Computer controlled "Heros" use those. Puuduu!
As this game is a clear port of the Battlefield 1942 series it seems to be fair to compüare the two:
-Spawning-Interface: Badly done, when selecting the Character class one does not see how many of each type the team already has so more often then not the team is rather unbalanced (at least in public games that is) and even worse after selcting the spawn point and hitting join, the countdown to respawn starts on a different screen. This results in the bad side-effect that when the selected spawn-point is lost during this period you will spawn on the last selected one which could bring you to the most inappropriate place, like 30 Seconds away from the Battle.
-Sniper-Class: Problem is that almost every weapon has zooming ability and when only single shots are fired are almost as accurate as the sniper weapons but have a much larger clip and reserve ammunition as well as a faster rate of fire. Now the Sniper Rifle does have twice the zooming capeability it simplay lacks power.
Even a fully zoomed perfect headshot does not take down an enemy. One needs two hits at least. Bah, bad balance. Actualy makes me wonder if the game discriminates between different hit-zones at all.
All in all the game is fun to play but has some realy annoying downsides.
So I guess it is ok for Star Wars Fans while all others may like the Battlefield series more.
An alternative could be the Star Wars Mod for Battlefield...sort of like the best of both worlds (I guess that mod will increase in quality quite a bit after the modders have ripped some resources from Battlefront *g*)
Anyway, I hope this helps those interested in the game.
Have fun, I'm off to kick some Rebel-scum's Butt. :lol:
Dave
I am not trying to post like a Wanker but my english has a pretty strong krautish influence.
Feel free to flame the content but give me some slack on spelling an grammar, thanks
_______________________________
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
Feel free to flame the content but give me some slack on spelling an grammar, thanks
_______________________________
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
