Battlefront 2 | Like the Simulations | 2005, Classic Review

i hope no one thought dice was going to get two videos in a row battlefront 2 rode the tail end of a wave of star wars games that defined not only the golden age of star wars video games but arguably gaming itself it'll probably be better to discuss the history of star wars games in a force unleashed video but that's not today's topic what's interesting about the star wars franchise is the sheer variety of games that got made in it a battlefield simulation where you lead a fire team of troops through the various battles that occur in the movies it shares the same space as real-time strategy fast-paced first-person shooters even racing games yet even each experience was varied this isn't just a squad-based shooter it also has playable characters from the films and space battles and vehicles even has a grand strategy mode well grand is over selling it but we'll get there i should mention battlefront 1 the original it came out little over a year prior to battlefront 2. battlefront 2 was essentially the same game packaged with improvements as well as more content from revenge of the sith yet battlefront 2 was missing content from the first game mainly maps although in fairness the game did come in a fat case containing 4 cds so some corner cutting was understandable there are 3 ways to play the game you can queue up maps and jump straight into it with instant action you can play through the single player campaign or you can play galactic conquest as any of the original or prequel factions instant action will give you the best general feel for the game but lacks the narrative appeal of single player and emergent storytelling of galactic conquest so what's the appeal well just look at it instant action has the biggest battles your system can handle which of course today is the value maxed out at 32v32 in conquest and 128 vs 128 on the xl maps although the ai noticeably takes a hit when playing xl there's also capture the flag but that isn't fun outside of multiplayer which in a surprising twist was brought back after game spy shutdown instant action is also where the hero battle mode at tatooine and all the hunt game modes exist exclusively and you could do weird stuff like republic versus droids on the death star or play in jabba's palace and of course you have the freedom to play any map at any time unlike the other modes games of conquest involve capturing and holding command posts and trying to run the enemy's ticket counter to zero holding over half the posts will remove tickets otherwise you have to kill the enemy faster than they can kill your team the drop shadow at this high resolution does make reading the ticket counters difficult once you choose a faction you'll initially have four classes to choose from as you earn points during the match you'll unlock two more classes and if you earn enough points you'll be offered to play as a hero for the map usually a lightsaber wielder but sometimes characters like boba fett or han solo all four factions have the same general starting characters a generic soldier with an automatic weapon an anti-tank soldier with a rocket launcher a sniper and an engineer armed with a shotgun and repair tool the latter three classes are effectively identical between factions while the soldier will vary in terms of their weapon and the droids even have a wrist rocket rather than a grenade where the factions largely differ is in their unlocked classes there are limits on the number of these classes that can show up but the game will always keep slots open to the player for the cis these are the magnaguard and droideka the magnaguard seems to be designed towards breaking turret emplacements and is the weakest in a pure infantry environment the primary weapon is a six-shot rocket launcher which is pretty effective but has the obvious disadvantage of killing both allies and enemies this is where the radiation launcher is handy which is identical to other grenade launchers with the added benefit of not harming your fellow droids they also have neurotoxin an ability that poisons enemies around them with a damage over time effect and they have the recon droid which seems to be more so a hindrance to the ai than anything else seen as the ai will deploy in the open and usually die when they do so the droidica is where things get interesting this character is very mechanically different from any other class in the game in a standing stance you can deploy a shield and have pretty effective anti-personnel blasters to boot but you aren't very maneuverable and the ai will spam grenades at you if you crouch you deploy into a ball that can roll around and move rapidly but are unshielded and can die quickly these characters are very dangerous to heroes and work great in defensive situations but the ai is not very good at playing them and will often drop shields when enemies aren't around but don't usually put them back up if you move fast enough into their area the republic has its own interesting counterparts the clone commander is armed with a chain gun which needs a second to spool up and can overheat but has infinite ammo this makes using the weapon more deliberate as you have to acclimate yourself to its quirks but is devastating once you figure out how to use it it's not as simple as just letting off the trigger to keep the gun from overheating as it has to re-spool so there are unavoidable down times with the weapon which is hardly a weakness as the commander also carries his sidearm his real strength though is in his name commanding units in battlefront can be commanded to follow the player the number of units you recruit depends on the rank of your player profile which increases through play time you start with one follower slot and end with four slots so as the clone commander you can have a fire team following you to supplement when your chain gun is down but you also have the rally ability which applies damage reduction to units around you meaning your squad will easily devastate the enemy but since the commander also has the recon drone and the ai doesn't really seem capable of using the chain gun the enemy commanders pose little threat the jet trooper similar to the droidica is a unit whose primary focus is mobility they're equipped with a jetpack which when paired with the level design of battlefront 2 creates a lot of opportunities for vertical exploitation his emp launcher is a decent all-purpose rocket launcher its main weakness being the limited ammo you can carry for it so you can stick with the jet trooper's sidearm and his 4 grenades it is interesting how the jet trooper and the droideka are so well balanced the droidica can easily handle a flying target and the jet troopers well equipped to sap their shields the rebels have the bothan spy their loadout is extremely specialized as they come with an incinerator and a stealth ability unlike the other officer classes the bothan spy encourages a much more selfish play style of entering an area incinerating an unsuspecting opponent and then stealthing away however the stealth is bugged and doesn't really work when used against the ai which isn't surprising given how hacked together the ability is it's actually a one-shot pistol which means that it takes the pistol slot so there's no backup weapon to the incinerator which itself has a small ammo pool and a slow reload their only supplement is the regeneration ability it's interesting the one officer class that can heal friendly units is designed for the more selfish play style as such the wookie warrior tries to balance the rebels out his bow caster alone is a versatile weapon working as both a shotgun and sniper rifle depending on how you charge it and he has a large pool of health making him tankier than the engineer and sniper classes yeti also carries a grenade launcher and four grenades simply put the warrior exists to help carry his team where the moth and spy necessarily can't but usually the ai fails because he happens to carry that recon droid that the ai will always prioritize using finally we have the empire units the imperial officer like the clone commander carries a quirky gun which encourages keeping a team of lower ranking units as backup the sonic pistol is a slow moving but quick firing weapon which requires headshots to work solo but has a limited range the officer supplements this pistol with a grenade launcher and has the benefit of carrying more grenades than the warrior does the officer's biggest boot however is his rage ability increasing the damage of nearby friendly units turning his personal fire team into a death squad this makes him dangerous enough that even the ai disadvantage of the recon droid he will still pose a threat the dark trooper is inversely not a problem in the hands of the ai since he requires a lot more skill to use effectively his jetpack is more like a jump pack operating in a tight arc rather than allowing a free flight and the arc caster is highly situational in how it should be used it's powerful no doubt about that but the ai just isn't capable of making full use of it i've mentioned it a bunch so let's get into it the ai the ai operates best in the core of battlefront which are the four universal classes in a 32-32 environment with a simple map it's easier to forgive the ai for being noticeably slow on xl maps but i started to notice repeat problems even when the ai should be in its prime first are the ways the ai seems to handle priorities the ai when they are near a vehicle or turret will always be lined to operate that vehicle or turret a sniper operating a turret runs counter to the obvious logic that the engineer class should fill that role given they have the repair tool necessary to fix the turret when it takes damage and the sniper would be better suited to using their long range weapon if you get into a position where you can shoot the turret operator you will see the ai prioritize replacing the dead gunner even at the cost of their own life over securing the turret again for safe operation the same is true with vehicles the ai will be lined to pilot a spacecraft over dealing with intruders who are actively attempting to kill them the eye will attempt to make use of cover however given the time period it's probably accurate to guess these cover locations are hard coded into the maps rather than dynamic so once those positions are filled assuming they exist the ai will begin taking positions in open areas the ai also makes no attempt to coordinate pushes or follow any kind of command hierarchy simply pushing in respawn waves against each other the player is the only unit on the map which will consider complex flanking maneuvers or capturing command posts with weak defenses rather than throwing themselves at the closest command post now it's easy to say that the ai is bad but let's consider a simple possibility battlefront 2 may be remembered nostalgically because the ai is bad this game is all about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer it's a sort of toxic multiplayer design that eventually smothers its own player count when the player gets enough kills with a weapon they're generally given an upgraded version of that weapon that is better i say mostly because the beam rifle does exist the player also gets award for earning points that increases damage done and reduces damage taken the player will get advanced classes from earning points and the player will get access to the absurdly powerful heroes and villains for earning the most points the game is feeding a power fantasy as the player mows down hordes of simple ai and feels powerful for it i made a fresh profile and i finished the main campaign the four galactic conquest campaigns and a handful of instant action matches with over 4 000 kills in 20 hours some matches i killed over 100 enemies and some matches over 200. the ai actually being intelligent would run contrary to what the developers are trying to sell the player which is a power fantasy so with that in mind let's play the single player campaign there isn't much to say about the main campaign it follows the story of a clone trooper belonging to the 501st who is a veteran of all the major battles from the end of attack of the clones to the beginning of empire strikes back the game came out at the same time as the tartakovsky clone wars series which is important because it means that all that fleshing out the clones got in the 3d clone wars series hadn't happened yet so for instance the 501st is used kind of interchangeably with the broader clone army rather than just the battalion that was directly under skywalker's command the clones are outright stated to have been aware of order 66 long before the day came which was later retconned and this game certainly didn't help with the perception people have that these stormtroopers from the original trilogy are clones which largely they never were the franchise was just bad at establishing that fact the story mostly comes in the form of pre-rendered cutscenes narrated by temura morrison which is pretty cool it's also an interesting example of machinima since the footage used is almost all gameplay animations i'll note here that the cutscenes and menus have fixed resolutions but the game doesn't however rather than scaling up the cutscenes and menus it changes the resolution which means the screen size constantly changes and messes with all the windows like moving obs off my second monitor you won't see any of it thanks to editing but it was a pain the first mission at geonosis serves as a tutorial which i think is a fine way to acclimate yourself to how the classes work as well as move past the attack of the clones era as quickly as possible which was the goal of the game seen as it was a revenge of the sith tie-in almost six months late the first mission takes place at mygeeto with the 501st attempting to acquire an experimental power source it mostly plays the same as a normal conquest match on mygeeto although it introduces very quickly the idea that the ticket counter is not forgiving the enemy has infinite respawns we don't and while i don't fail often it usually was a little too close for comfort the next mission takes place in the orbit of coruscant although it's optional like all the space missions the devs didn't seem confident in space combat which is why all the space missions and the campaign are optional which is strange because not only is the space combat mechanically fine but this is probably the most varied it gets in the game although this mission is effectively just a tutorial we move on to felucia the first of several jungle maps although felucia suffers as they lowered the view distance to slightly farther than morrowind this mission is fun because it includes acklays which run around and cause chaos in the ranks it's a shame they don't show up as wild cards in normal conquest matches on this map as neutral factions taking objectives did happen in the first game the next mission in orbit of kashyyyk exists to tutorialize the concept of shipboarding and the subsequent ground mission is required to hold the line for several minutes until yoda shows up but his ability to turn the tide is vastly overstated as yoda is actually one of the weaker heroes then we head to udapal and it's funny because i diaz obi-wan to a thermal detonator before getting to have a proper duel with grievous but if you want to know where things go sideways nightfall we have been directed by the highest authority to wipe out the insurgent jedi order that threatens our great empire this is the mission where the five of first wiped out the jedi temple and yeah that's what happens minus the youngling scene fighting the jedi isn't as difficult as maybe it should be until an impromptu defense sequence in the library we have to stop the jedi from destroying the bookcases for two minutes which wouldn't be as bad if a bunch of jedi didn't descend from the ceiling like ninjas all at once at the one minute mark and prioritize destroying their literature over self-preservation when you fail missions you go right back to the beginning so there's a sort of tension the second time through as i'm just counting the seconds until the wave spawns hoping they don't destroy everything it's just a shame all these jedi assets exist exclusively for this one mission now we're in the empire and our next mission is at naboo two yeah why is that anyways if our primary objective is to eliminate the naboo leadership surely an orbital bombardment would have sufficed not that i dislike playing as the empire and going around doing imperial things it's more so a problem with how the imperials are always portrayed in the series well as long as i'm in control i hit what i'm aiming at sir the droids have landed on our ship we can't launch our fighters that is a lie the ai units usually just ignore me when i board their ship i don't see why you can't ignore them mustafar space is a strange mission because this is the first space mission that doesn't really exist to teach the player anything we repel the invaders kill some spacecraft take down the shields and then steal a bomber no reason given either maybe it's a cut plot point from revenge of the sith that made it in the next two missions are fairly similar in that they feature the empire fighting one of the sides of the galactic civil war starting with droids on mustafar and rogue clones of camino these events never happen in the movies and mostly exist to bridge the gap between them but it is nice to see the empire fighting against untraditional enemies there's a bit of dissonance in the next mission which takes place aboard the death star where the narrator will refer to how disastrous the mission went when it was actually really clean things got so bad that when a prison break erupted in the cell block we were almost happy to have someone shooting at us again if only we'd known what an embarrassing snipe storm we were about to wade into we probably would have jettisoned the whole detention block into space rebel prisoners are attempting to escape and we put down the riot their leader a jedi even shows up and gets killed so overall massive success yet it's referred to as an embarrassment and the 501st got reassigned off station so we could continue after the death star's destruction it's a good thing this guy retired before indoor if this is his standard for embarrassing this continues on to polus masa the raid on paulus masa was a perfect example of how things were starting to fall apart we were supposed to go in wipe out a small band of rebels and recover some stolen imperial plans on an encrypted holodesk before we knew it we were nearly overrun by rebel forces with the holodisk nowhere to be found that is not what happens at all granted we don't find the death star plans because kyle katarn and janor's uh sorry uh cassian andor and jyn erso stole them is that still cannon or has another story been written about who really stole the plans we take the tan to four so it doesn't matter quite a bit more violently than what happens in the movie although the new movies like to show vader hacking people to bits i realize now if you don't know what happens in star wars this plot might be confusing because between now and the next mission the death star gets destroyed off-screen the significance of which is lost if this is your only exposure to the franchise battlefront 2 is the earliest star wars media that i personally remember that pointed out the significant loss of life when the death star went down i mean it wasn't senseless like alderaan but it seems like a big deal given how many people must have lived there yavin 4 orbit is just a basic bombing mission it's entirely skippable if you don't want to know how the rebels went from destroying the death star to abandoning their planet it's here towards the end of the campaign that things get extremely difficult i miss when games used to be like this you have to be focused for most of the campaign but the yavin 4 and hoth battles require your full attention yavin 4 pulls a dirty trick where apparently it scales the alpha map of the water texture incorrectly which causes this visual glitch you can fix it by turning the water quality down but it doesn't immediately take effect so the duration of this mission i just thought it was a campaign exclusive glitch after a harrowing two minute defense getting barraged by missile trucks and turret emplacements that strike me as war crimes the mission then has the player grab a bomb atop this pyramid at the enemy's spawn and take it into their headquarters this caused me to fail the first time so for us to lose the defense segment the enemy has to capture our control point which takes time so with 20 seconds on the clock i book it over to where the bomb spawns because the enemies aren't spawning there yet grab the bomb as soon as it appears and fight my way out this victory screen where the wookie's standing over my corpse yeah that samurai is the mission hoth is the final level of the game a fitting conclusion for an empire-focused story because it was effectively the last time the empire was treated as a serious threat in star wars the last hour and a half of my campaign was spent on this one mission for a few minutes i slogged through the battle on foot i recognized the turrets were a substantial threat to completing the mission and that i could control the atat to kill them the rebels have an interesting strategy to beat the walkers no not the cables they can't pull that off this made things easier but actually taking the control points to advance the map is still a moderate challenge as the ticket counter slowly decreases if you're quick enough and delay spawning as darth vader as long as possible you'll have an easier time of taking the objective inside the base we finally reach the millennium falcon right as it escapes and the mission ends there alright fine i won't lie to you there's one more objective we have 15 minutes to plant a beacon under this rebel ship for a bombing run you have wasted an entire brigade of imperial troopers and have cost the empire its most important battle excellent now protect the beacon while we lock in your current position that's not the challenging part not at all we have to defend the beacon for one minute i had to cheat to finish this and try it again at a later point i did beat it but i had to get lucky there's no singular objective in battlefront 2 that better showcases the fact that the ai is incapable of playing the objective so the player has to hop out of the atat to capture objectives and the player has to watch as the ai spams grenades at the beacon trying to blow it up without any resistance from the other stormtroopers even to the point of suicide anyways that marks the end of the single player campaign it's short but it doesn't really have any filler and it's not the only single player content the game has conquest is the highlight of the game for me personally as much as i like instant action i desire context for the battles that are being fought which is going to be mixed if you have no clue what the motivations of the factions of star wars even are each individual conquest campaign clocked in at a total of two to three hours because the actual campaign is not difficult the main game of conquest is this strategy map of the star wars galaxy which is verifiably not canon the player always starts with only a couple systems you can build fleets the first one is free and each subsequent fleet costs 1 000 the more fleets you have so your second is 1k the third is 2k etc but if a fleet is destroyed the cost will then go back down each turn the player and ai can move one fleet over one system if a fleet arrives at a planet a ground battle occurs if two fleets meet a space battle occurs if two fleets meet at a planet a space battle occurs and if the aggressor wins the space battle then a ground battle occurs if an aggressor wins this ground battle they conquer the planet there's no diplomacy and the economy works like this each turn and after battles each player generates credits credits can be spent on building fleets or used to unlock new units or expendable combat bonuses and that's the strategy game in a nutshell it's extremely simplified in terms of strategy games and its basic rule set suffers some pretty big issues the first is that a fleet can be constructed and moved in the same turn this means if a player is down to one system they can easily delay the inevitable over several turns the ai also doesn't seem to make effective use out of multiple fleets nor will it attempt to hold strategic choke points on the map i believe this is because the ai prioritizes upgrading its ground forces and buying bonuses over owning multiple fleets the other problem is that an inordinate number of the battles are space battles the only thing that ever changes is the location of the ships otherwise each space battle will play out exactly the same these battles are extremely easy to win and i never lost a single one there are three main paths to cheesing the ai the first is to hop in a bomber and blow up the frigates and all the ship systems this by itself won't win the battle but will put the player's side at such a point advantage that the ai will not catch up the second is to hop in a fighter and blow up enemy ships like the ground units the space units have a hard time defending themselves from a human player the only time i usually died was when a bomber would one shot a weak fighter class so i just stuck to ships that had more health the third strategy to winning space battles is to load up a transport craft and to land in the enemy hangar using the timed explosives of the engineer class you can take out the auto turrets shields life support and engines from the inside after that you just hang out in the ship shooting pilots and blowing up ships where you can oh yeah the ai won't automatically get out of the gunner slots even if you order them too so to fix this you have to take off and land a couple times until all the units get out if you don't want the ei to pilot the mobile spawn point into the side of the enemy hangar you can and will have to switch things up in space battles because the number you'll have to fight over the course of all the conquest campaigns is insane but it won't matter as each of these strategies will become extremely repetitive before the end i would accept a 50 50 auto resolve that i win 25 of the time over having to fight every single space battle every single time onto the ground war then each ground battle is essentially instant action both sides start with the same number of command posts and 150 tickets hit zero tickets or hold no command post for 20 seconds and you lose given that the matches are perfectly equal but one team has a human player and the other team has you know the rebel ai shooting a stormtrooper's body you would think each battle would be a curb stomp no the mode seems balanced around the player racking up tons of kills you're expected to be carrying your team i can pick pretty much any of the even matches that happened and it is absurd that the player could kill five times as many enemies as the top guy on the enemy team and the matches are still such a close call that's just the even matches hey this is me in post since recording the original audio i went back and played the same galactic conquest match five times where i would get an average ai kdr of like four or five kills to one death and set the rest of the match out and not only did all of those matches end in defeat but defeat by a wide margin glancing at the leaderboard seems to indicate that my theory that the enemy ai is superior to the friendly ai is probably accurate it wasn't the best map to do this on since i was playing rebels on naboo which have the typical rebel ai quirks as well as the cursed corner of friendlies getting killed by grenades but judging by how all the other matches went i'd say this applies to all of the campaigns in galactic conquest there's definitely a trend here there were more than a couple galactic conquest matches that came down to me being the last unit having to fight over a dozen enemies now purchasing units doesn't seem to overly tip the scales in either respect the demolition guys will make your team worse in cqb maps but better on vehicle heavy maps and you will see the odd engineer who runs around with just his repair tool out but having access to the repair tool is important if you play that playstyle where the differences appear are the combat bonuses energy boosts increase stamina region not exactly a game changer same with supplies the ia unit will die before they ever reach the surplus ammo auto turrets won't hinder a human player but the ai seems less capable of handling them sabotage does damage to the enemy vehicle starting health this is situational based on map and play style back to tanks provide a passive health regen for all units which is a significant bonus to have combat shielding will give all units a larger pool of health which is again pretty significant as it will tip the scale in a one-on-one fight enhanced blasters will cause your units to deal more damage another big scale tipper and the leader bonus unlocks the ability to play as the hero units which is basically a human player slamming the scale down with an overpowered unit slayer it's only downside is that it's very expensive for the price of 1 liter bonus you could buy 4 garrison bonuses you can't even have more than three the garrison bonus is basically paying for more tickets and is absolutely essential if you plan on winning galactic conquest without fighting 100 space battles the ai has difficulty making intelligent use of bonuses and is willing to let the player use garrison bonus after garrison bonus without any attempt to counter i played the campaigns in the order they're listed on the selection screen with the rebels cis republican empire now the rebels would honestly benefit the most from having a more complex strategy game as they had to use actual guerrilla tactics and couldn't just raise fleets and conquer planets like they're an empire you won't get that simulation here the republic era map basically forms a giant ring with a one lane pass through this northern sector while the empire map is a c-shape with each home system being at the ends there also simply aren't enough maps for each era to have a full galaxy so you'll see the empire fighting at prequel maps like a mygeto and droids and original maps like yavin 4 and there are several places which don't get used but should like the tanta four and death star maps or jabba's palace and then there's dagobah i had to fight the ground battle on dagobah every single campaign and besides it having the texture bug this map is cursed not just in these playthroughs but every time i play galactic conquest dagobah is the worst ground battle i will always park a fleet in orbit once i take the planet just to avoid having to fight there for some reason i have to bring the garrison bonus just to have a chance of winning the battle given the tone of everything i just said i must hate battlefront 2 right i seriously don't understand why people think like this the obvious answer is no battlefront 2 has more than nostalgia going for it even as a kid i recognized most of the issues i stated in this video yet i loved it the long-term success of battlefront 2 the reason people begged for a third entry to the series and why people lamented the pale imitation that our dice's battlefront games is very simple it's a power fantasy it's not uncommon to see me getting over 100 kills in a match when i'm mowing down rebel scum in an atat sitting in a hangar dumming oblivious pilots going on a killing spree with the elite rifle clicking on people's head with the sniper rifle and desperately trying to avoid accepting the beam rifle or slashing through entire crowds of enemies with a jedi character you get power-ups for doing well and eventually those power-ups become permanent there's also multiplayer and it was multiplayer instant action meaning a fun single player campaign became fun with friends honestly it's pretty cool that after the game spy shut down disney was willing to restore the multiplayer of the classic battlefront 2 even if it meant potentially costing themselves money when players aren't paying for the loot boxes i won't forgive them for greenlighting a sequel with the same name for the sake of confusing players and trying to make people forget the older better games or for retconning a bunch of the canon or for the sequel trilogy shout out to the patrons currently on screen for funding this video they're making it possible to create these videos which i use as practice as well as the oblivion video if you haven't you can catch my streams where i play games take calls and even watch other people's videos on oblivion because i can't make original content patrons get early access to videos as well as behind the scenes content updates and potentially exclusive live streams if they want that i don't know reach out if you want that otherwise have a happy april and look out for another video sometime soon

Channel: PatricianTV

Views: 1,254,323

Keywords: Patrician, patrician battlefront 2, battlefront 2 review, battlefront 2 review 2021, battlefront 2 2005 review, battlefront 2 classic review

Id: K1WNT0ku_RI

Length: 31min 0sec (1860 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021