The original 2004 official Star Wars role-based massive team shooter. Noticeably more primitive than the 2005 sequel, but in terms of Steam version-specific reliability, by far the better game.
My Review of the 2005 Star Wars Battlefront 2 is an older review, but I think it still checks out. Apart from outlining the basics of the game, its main point is that the Steam version specifically was, and still is, awfully bad in terms of optimisation and performance. So much so that on many decent systems, it’s just going to be unplayable. The quest to find a replacement for it in my Steam Library naturally lead be to its predecessor, which I gave a try without any great expectations in mind. Low and behold, not only does it run as perfectly great as you’d expect on any modern hardware, it’s actually a lot better than many of us might remember.
Battlefront 1 was unfortunately abandoned by many of the community back in the day in favour of the technologically superior sequel (would be nice if it worked now). The engine, concept, and much of the moment-to-moment gameplay is the same for the most part, so if you want to know what it’s like, go take note of all the positive points in my SWBF2 review. Consider this a call to come back to the original, because in looking back, I’ve quickly noticed that this first version actually holds many objective advantages:
The ability to go completely prone lying on the ground.
Class choices much more balanced around even power distribution.
Much improved first-person viewmodels, especially for vehicles.
The ability to replay individual campaign levels vanilla.
Twice the campaigns.
Twice the Galactic Conquest modes.
The best exclusive vanilla maps in the series (Dune Sea, Bespin Platforms, Cloud City, anybody?)
The use of the phrase “Revenge of the Sith” as the title of a Galactic Conquest scenario a year before the release of the movie.
Roughly forty minutes of FMV cutscenes made from footage ripped from the first five Star Wars films.
Put aide any preconceptions you might have about going back to the earliest instalment in the series and give it a go if you either want to get into the franchise for the first time, or just if you got put off by the technical faults in the new release of SWBF2.
Recommended.
