Star Wars: Battlefront Beta - Still... In A Galaxy Far, Far Away

The Star Wars: Battlefront beta is fantastic! Since the announcement at E3 2014 the hype surrounding this and the upcoming movie has grown substantially and continuing to appeal to a new and old audience of the franchise – and a much needed wake up call for IP.

The game is due for release next month, so to add to the hype EA released a public beta to allow for what is commonly known as a “stress test” for its servers.

All to recently we have seen games released into the market that have had some serious issues, all could have been prevented using this method – so It’s refreshing change and something that I admire DICE for doing, and doing properly.

I sat down to play the beta over a couple of hours this weekend, and found myself hopping aboard the hype train.

It’s a solid shooter, and one that I feel is going to be very dominant amongst gamers and fans of the franchise. The multiplayer campaigns – Drop Zone & Walker Assault – appear to be very popular amongst social media at the moment, and every post that I see is taken from these 2 multiplayer experiences. They are tons of fun, and all be it from a few graphical and environmental glitches (it’s a beta after all) I found myself really enjoying a multiplayer shooter – something that I haven’t done for a long time.

The single player campaign on the other hand is very disappointing…

The campaign known as Survival mode drops you onto a layered map and asks you to defend upon waves of enemies, including Storm Troopers and AT-STs. Once completed you will get a time depending on how long you have survived. 

I do agree that it is – as what you would expect from a survival simulator, but not from a Star Wars game. I was expecting much more, a purpose, more of a story and missioned based play – honestly, this is boring and dull and not something that I would pay ￡45 for at the moment.

However this is the point of having a beta test. Firstly to see how the systems react and play in real-world conditions, but also to see how the audience reacts.

Of course with this being a beta there is still a lot more to explore in the full game and I hope that the single player campaign is grown to be more than just simple wave attacks with no context to any story.

Jim

(are you participating in the beta? looking forward to the movie? let me know in the comments or follow & tweet @K1NGJ1M)