Maybe just maybe I’m a bit biased here, but Star Wars is the greatest franchise in existence and you’re wrong if you disagree. Moving on. Last year DICE released the sequel to the not so amazing Star Was Battlefront, which was of course imaginatively named Battlefront 2… And you can forgive people for being a bit worried at the time. Sure all the trailers looked pretty and they added all the stuff the first game missed like more heroes and battles from ALL the eras of Star Wars…

…But then they tripped up when they added the Darth Bane of all gamer’s lives. MICRO-FUCKING-TRANSACTIONS. So the more credit rich players could easily throw cash at the game and get some badass character upgrades and faster access to the various heroes, earning a gameplay advantage. There was a particular irk for fans when we found out that Vader was locked behind a 60,000 credit wall – Now considering that you could hope to earn about 400 to 500 credits per match if you performed well, you were looking at nearly 120 matches before you could go to war as everyone’s favourite Dark Knight (Yeah fuck you Batman). This obviously stung and the fans didn’t take it… They rebelled. DICE and EA were buried under negative press and not too far into the game’s lifetime we got an update that removed all of the micro transactions! Say hello to a level playing field! Oh wait? You still need to be good at the game to survive? Well shit…

if you haven’t played or even seen gameplay before, then let me give you a run down. More or less as advertised in the title, you step into the shoes of a single trooper in the army for any one of the factions across the Star Wars timeline, either attacking or defending on one of many beautifully recreated worlds from the galaxy. If boots-on-the-ground isn’t your style, then maybe you could strap into an X-Wing or TIE fighter and try your hand at the Starfighter Assault mode, which has seen a significant improvement since the first game’s dull sky-based death matches, and now gives you some actual objectives! There’s not much in this world more satisfying than chaining a few good kills in a dogfight and unlocking the ability to use a hero craft – My favourites being Poe Dameron and Boba Fett in Slave 1. The heroes in all modes are the most fun thing you can do without taking your clothes off.. Or you can. I don’t know what your gaming process is. There are some heroes though that are pretty outclassed – You don’t often see people taking to the field as Lando or Captain Phasma for example, since neither come with really useful or fun abilities, not like someone like. say, Kylo Ren who can freeze enemies in front of him that he can then slice through in full tantrum mode!

Why am I writing this then? It’s because if you let the negative press dissuade you before, and honestly I don’t blame you if it did, then you should give this game a chance now! There have been a fair few updates since release that have made the entire experience many times better! Obviously the biggest and probably most important was dropping the credit locks on almost all of the hero characters, so now you can throw a tantrum with Kylo Ren or ignore the odds with Han Solo and you won’t need to pay a penny! Now these rules don’t apply to the freshly added characters General Grevious and professional Jesus cosplayer Obi-Wan Kenobi. These two are stuck behind a wall that needs 35,000 credits apiece to free them. I think we can all agree though that this is more reasonable, and besides with the new challenges that drop credit awards you’ll be recreating that fight from Revenge of the Sith in no time at all!

It seems that DICE have followed that classic Ubisoft technique and made a game many times more playable a year after its original release! The thing that makes Battlefront 2 stand out though is that the base game is a bargain, and all the added content is free to almost all players! That includes even more upcoming content that’ll bring the fencing Sith Lord Count Dooku and floppy haired edge lord Anakin Skywalker to the battle!

So ends my little rant about why you should care about Battlefront 2, now that the drama has settled – Let me know your thoughts below!