Star Wars: Battlefront

Star Wars Battlefront captures the essence of Star Wars beautifully, harnessing the most exciting and memorable pieces of the universe for a unique and spectacular combat sandbox. Aside from awkward performances and a poor original score, Battlefront is a master class in aesthetic authenticity. Beyond a few essential modes built for casual competition, however, Battlefront is unfocused, relying on excess game types to compensate for an absent single-player campaign.

Star Wars Battlefront shooter brings grand spectacle to the iconic sci-fi universe, but the overall experience wears thin with time.

Battlefront's multiplayer-centric action is stylish and refreshingly simple, although it can feel more stunted than streamlined.

Brilliantly captures the look and feel of classic Star Wars, but beneath its cinematic flair lies a pretty generic multiplayer shooter.

Battlefront trades complexity for accessibility

A beautiful recreation of Star Wars, and a solid if simple shooter. This is a game you'll love intensely albeit for a short space of time.

Star Wars' battles have never looked or played this well, but the thrills grow repetitive quickly

Get a bunch of equally enthusiastic friends together and you'll have many hours of nostalgic revery, with that Williams score nudging you through match after match. But then you'll reach the outer edge of this game's progression system, or you'll get a little too familiar with the four landscapes on offer, and the magic will wane. And then, of course, there will be downloadable content, massing in a distant corner of the galaxy, waiting to invade.

In good moments, it feels like you're heading somewhere promising, halfway to getting a gun you really want. In bad moments, getting what you want is a pleasureless anti-climax, that leaves you even further away from the next upgrade milestone.

While the destructive potential of weapons and cards alike in some cases increases as you level up, it's much more about finding the ones you like best rather than having a de facto edge. Sadly, this in turn means that unlocks can be quite underwhelming, especially as weapons are all bound to obey the movies' pew-pew and dead behaviour. A new pistol or rifle might look different, but bar a few explicitly short-range/higher damage variants, it feels broadly the same as anything else. You don't feel empowered by your new toy, but instead have to get on back out there and keep doing the same thing.