Star Wars has always been a universe of particular importance to me, so it's no surprise that many of the games I played when I was younger took place in that world. It wasn't that long ago that I developed a nostalgic itch to revisit them, and here we are. Some of these games haven't aged a day, while others definitely could've been left behind.
Star Wars: Battlefront II – 2004 (****)
This was my first real experience with a first-person shooter, and I loved every moment of it.
Sometimes, nostalgia can cloud our hindsight and make us think that something from the past was greater than it actually was. That’s not the case with Battlefront II. Revisiting the game for the first time in over a decade, I was reminded of all the stuff that made this game so much fun. First and foremost, it’s a game that really captures the feeling of the Star Wars universe. You get to run around as a stormtrooper picking off rebel scum (I never played as the rebels if I could help it), and all the sounds and sights plunge you straight into the galaxy far, far away. You hear your fellow comrades yell things like:
“I want those rebels dead!”
“Watch those wrist rockets!”
“Take that bomber down!”
If you listen very closely (it’s only happened twice in the entire history of me playing the game), you might even catch a stormtrooper whistling The Imperial March as he runs by. The sound design really adds so much to this game.
Of course, it wouldn’t be Star Wars without the Jedi. Battlefront II lets you occasionally swap out playing a trooper for a hero or villain from the films. Most of them are Jedi or Sith, but you can also play as Boba Fett, Han Solo, and other blaster-armed characters. That’s where the fun really begins, because these leaders are massively overpowered. Once you get a feel for them, you can mow down like fifty enemies without even breaking a sweat. It’s a ton of fun – and again, that’s heightened by hearing characters exclaim with horror at your approach: “It’s Vader!”
For me, though, my favourite part of this game was always the space combat. You could hop into many of the iconic ships from the Star Wars saga to try and take down a Star Destroyer or some other flagship, and the controls were really fun. You could do flips and barrel rolls to get someone off your tail, which always makes you feel like a boss. The dogfights are fun, but I always seemed to be fixed on boarding the enemy ship. There’s something so fun about hopping into a fighter, soaring over to the bad guy’s hangar, hopping out, and then wreaking havoc on their command station. It’s seriously never gotten old for me.
Apart from “Instant Action” where you can just hop into a battle without any hassle, there’s also a campaign that isn’t much to write about. You just go through different maps completing various tasks – like blow up that thing, or shoot this thing three times, or put a grenade under that thing over there. What makes the campaign great is Temeura Morrison’s voice in the cutscenes. He plays a clone trooper that somehow lives through Episode II all the way to Episode V, and the gravitas he adds to the game is just incredible. His recordings during the level where Order 66 is carried out are honestly chilling. Whatever they had to pay him to do that, they got an absolute steal. It heightened the game so much.
Beyond the campaign, there’s also a mode called “Galactic Conquest” where you have a bit more control over your comrades and your space fleet. This mode feels vaguely reminiscent of another Star Wars game called Empire At War, and I remember when I was younger wishing they would mash the two games together. Empire At War’s land battles kind of sucked, but Battlefront’s were great – so if you could mix the two games into one, you’d have a knockout on your hands.
It was such a joy to revisit this game and zip around in a TIE fighter, throw a lightsaber at a bunch of rebels, and charge into battle with stormtroopers on all sides. If you’re in the mood for a nostalgia kick, this would be a great place to find it.
Star Wars: Empire At War (***1/2)
If you've ever wanted to feel like Emperor Palpatine, this is the game for you.
Empire At War was an interesting kind of real-time strategy game. There are three main components:
The land battles, where you’d control an army to try and take over a planet
The space battles, where you’d either defend a space station or try to blow up your opponent’s
The galaxy map, where you create and organize your armies and planets to prepare for further invasions
I’ll cut to the chase and say that the land battles sucked, but the space battles made up for it. The land battles had a cool zoom-in feature, but it just didn’t have the aesthetic appeal or energy that fellow RTS Age of Empires had. It was the space battles that really made this game worth every penny. Getting to build your fleet was fun, and of course it’s always a great feeling to charge into enemy space with ten Star Destroyers. But interestingly enough, it was also fun to get blindsided by a massive enemy fleet when you only had a ship or two in the area. Normally it can be frustrating, but here, you actually felt like you had options even in the midst of defeat. You could choose to turn tail and run for it to save whatever ships you had, or you could decide that it was best to die fighting and try to take out a valuable enemy ship in the process. Another cool element to this was how you’d sometimes get warnings that an enemy fleet was incoming. In those cases, you had a few seconds to try and gather reinforcements from nearby planets – and then you had to hope that they’d arrive in time. But mainly, what made the space battles great was the thrill of watching and listening to the action. Once again, we’ve got a Star Wars game where the sound design adds so much to the playability. And there’s even a button you can hit that turns the camera into a cinematic view, turning the whole scene from a game into a movie you can sit back and watch. Watching your fighters weave and swirl their way through enemy lines towards the space station is a blast, as is watching an enemy flagship shatter into large chunks that slowly drift off into space.
Then there’s the Death Star to consider. If you’re playing as the Empire, you actually get to build the thing, and then you can take it to enemy planets – and just blow them up. Honestly, it’s immensely satisfying to fly into an enemy stronghold, pull the level, and just incinerate the entire planet. There’s nothing not to like about that. When revisiting the game this year, I honestly just established my own chunk of the galaxy, defended it until I could build the Death Star, and then I just moved from planet to planet blowing up every last trace of the Rebel Alliance. I think I destroyed like fourteen planets. But hey, they were all on the Outer Rim so who cares.You could use the Death Star sparingly if you wanted to – after all, blowing up planets makes that space thoroughly useless – but where’s the fun in that?
It was also great controlling your Empire. This was where you really started to feel like Palpatine, looking down at your little galaxy and constructing space stations, weapons factories, and enlisting troops. There were a number of buildings and upgrades to put on planets, so you could decide what each planet ultimately did for you. Each planet also had its own unique advantages and bonuses, which gave you more ways to customize your strategy. You end up feeling like a total mastermind, with your control on the galaxy only increasing from moment to moment.
For someone who isn’t a Star Wars fan, this might not be the game for them. And as RTS games go, there are some that are a bit more intuitive and sensibly designed. But the space battles rock, and you can blow up planets. That alone is worth the price of admission.
Star Wars: Racer Revenge (***)
You know how growing up you always liked going to that one friend’s house because they had that toy/game/thing that you didn’t have? This game was that thing.
Star Wars: Racer Revenge is an exceedingly simple game. You select a podracer – many of which are recognizable from Episode I – and then you race on different planets against up to seven other computer players. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about it, except for two small factors. First, one of those characters is Ben Quadinaros. For the uninitiated, he was one of the podracers in Episode I. He’s in there for like fifteen seconds, but it’s a memorable fifteen seconds because he literally does not make it five feet in the race before his podracer breaks apart. So when I first saw this game and went through the roster of characters, I knew Ben was my guy – and that I would have to take him to the championship.
The other factor that made this game so addictive to me was the fact that you could level up your racers. It’s a common game tactic, but the opportunity to customize and build up my racer meant that each race was working towards a higher goal. I loved getting to choose whether to work on my racer’s boost engine or their defense. It’s stuff like that that hooks me right in, and I’m proud to say that I eventually did get a massively upgraded Ben Quadinaros to win the Podracing Championship.
There’s not much else to say about the game. There’s an element where you can smash into other podracers and eventually blow them up, but for the most part it’s just a game about being super super speedy. The visuals aren’t anything to write home about, and there’s not a whole lot of creativity in the track design. But for Star Wars fans like myself, this was the only racing game I was interested in.
Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds (**)
I distinctly remember crawling into bed at the age of no more than 7, with my father having turned out the light and saying goodnight as he walked out of my room.
“Have you ever wished they could make an Age of Empires with walkers in it?” he said on his way out the door.
“Yeah, that’d be awesome,” I said.
“They’re making one,” he returned, just before closing the door and leaving me in awestruck wonder. An Age of Empires game with Star Wars stuff? What could be cooler than that?? I remember being so excited as I drifted off to sleep that night.
At the time it was released, Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds turned out to be everything I’d wanted. You could play as six different teams, each one with iconic units and vehicles from the series. Instead of Age of Empires’ priests and monks, you now had Jedi which could convert enemy units or fight on their own. The addition of flying units was a really novel addition to the AOE formula, and I loved sending in a squadron of X-Wings to rain down on my opponents. But mostly, it was the Star Wars action figure collection I never had. In Scenario Editor, I could put all my favourite heroes and villains from the series in a small space and watch them duke it out, or take them on new adventures I designed myself. I had loads of fun with it.
Revisiting it twenty years later, I have to admit that it doesn’t pack quite the same punch as it did for me when it came out. It’s really nothing more than Age of Empires with a different coat of paint – virtually none of the game mechanics have changed. The aesthetic appeal seems to be a bit inferior to AOE as well, perhaps due to the fact that many of the Star Wars buildings are big piles of metal. They don’t have the charming design of AOE’s time period. But more than that, the sound design seems inferior not only to AOE but to other Star Wars games of the time. In AOE when you’re watching your little kingdom grow, you can hear the sound of your farmers tilling up earth. You can hear the chop of axes on lumber, and picks on gold mines. Even when you’re not in combat, your space is alive with action. In SWGB, there’s a surprising amount of silence for a good chunk of the game. Part of what makes so many other Star Wars games feel so authentically Star Wars is the sound, and that’s lacking in this game.
More than that, there’s something about the game that feels slower in pace compared to AOE2. Maybe that’s because I haven’t fine-tuned my strategy as much for this game, but in the handful of rounds I played it, I always felt like things were taking a bit too long to get anywhere.
I can’t deny the amount of fun I had with this game as a kid. I spent hours and hours and hours playing it. But I don’t think I’ll be coming back to this one again. If I want real-time strategy, I’ll head to AOE – and if I want Star Wars, I’ll head to Battlefront.
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