Star Wars: Battlefront II (PS4) – forced to rely on loot boxes

PLEASE NOTE: After weeks of fan complaints, and the intervention of Disney, EA has switched off all microtransactions in Star Wars: Battlefront II. Although they will return, in altered form, at a later date. You can read more about the surprise announcement here, but because of this the descriptions of in-game purchases in this review are, thankfully, no longer accurate. We will carry out a re-review of the game once the new system is in place and has had time to settle down.

UPDATE: As promised, our re-review is now live and you can read the whole thing, and see its new score, here.

£70 for a video game is madness and put me off buying a PS5 - Reader’s Feature

Battlefront II may end up being the most influential video game of the year, perhaps even the generation. Its use of microtransactions and loot boxes is cynical, exploitative, and harmful to every aspect of good video game design. And yet it tempts players into ignoring these faults with the promise of cool-looking Star Wars graphics and free DLC.



The choices are clear and the implications for the future of gaming easy to imagine. Will players take the quicker, easier, more seductive route, and accept the concept of ‘pay to win’? Or will they reject the game and its attempts to devalue player effort and traditional rewards? EA has clearly been tempted to the Dark Side, the question is whether you will be as well.


Even if you somehow ignore the issue of loot boxes Battlefront II is still a very difficult game to review, since it’s composed of three almost entirely separate components: a class-based online shooter, a single-player story campaign, and a multiplayer space combat simulator. Some work better than others, but if there’s one thing you can’t say about Battlefront II it’s that it suffers from a lack of content.

Although Battlefield developer DICE is in charge of the main multiplayer modes, the other two parts of the game have been created by completely different studios. Motive are a new team led by Jade Raymond and they have been tasked with overcoming DICE’s poor reputation for single-player modes. As such, the five-hour long story campaign concerns an Imperial special forces team who witness the destruction of the second Death Star on Endor and become involved in the Empire’s hardline response.

The story that transpires goes in exactly the direction you assume it will, but it has heart and is well acted. However, it quickly undermines its own attempts to tell a story from an Imperial perspective, and there are so many one-off missions where you’re controlling a major character from the movies that the lead protagonist begins to fade into the background.

And while the graphics are absolutely outstanding, in terms of gameplay there’s really nothing out of the ordinary for a first person shooter – with far too many moments where you just have to hold your ground and wipe out waves of mindless enemies. Without the veneer of Star Wars gadgetry and sound effects the campaign often seems rather old-fashioned and unimaginative.

The gunplay is also disappointing, with very flat controls that pale next to games like Destiny or Wolfenstein. It’s not actively bad, but the weapons lack feedback or any sense of weight, and it really doesn’t feel like what you imagine using a blaster would be like from watching the films. Which stands in direct contrast to the starfighter sections – which are a childhood dream come true.

Star Wars: Battlefront II (PS4) – the graphics really are gorgeous

There are several moments in the story where you end up controlling a spaceship of some sort and it’s always a highlight. But the game also has a separate mode called Starfighter Assault, developed by Burnout creators Criterion. Unlike Fighter Squadron from the first Battlefront there is no deathmatch option, but instead a series of objective-based maps that play very differently depending on what side you’re on.



Sometimes you’re simply defending and taking down enemy fighters, other times you’re attacking a First Order Star Destroyer in the middle of an asteroid field or fighting on the ocean planet from Attack Of The Clones. Once again, all of this looks fantastic but what really impresses is how relatively complex the controls are. Rather than having pre-set manoeuvres to evade missiles and enemies you have to do all the piloting yourself, which allows for a rare degree of freedom.

You also have to lead your targets, with an extra reticule showing where to aim, making for the most involved Star Wars starfighter sim since the X-Wing days. There’s also an impressive range of ships from all three eras of Star Wars movies, divided into three classes: fighter, interceptor, and bomber. These can be outfitted with up to three ‘star cards’ which imbue a range of buffs and abilities such as more powerful weapons or shorter recharge rates.

There’s also unique starships, such as the Millennium Falcon or Slave I, that can only be used once you’ve earned a certain number of points during that battle. These are the same principles used by the main multiplayer mode, except there the classes are things like assault and specialist, and the unique starships are ‘hero’ characters like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.

Starfighter Assault is great and we love it, but there are two problems: there’s not enough maps and… loot boxes.

We imagine a lot of people have heard the complaints about loot boxes and assumed it’s all a fuss about nothing. But it’s not just that the loot boxes feature non-cosmetic upgrades, that give you a clear advantage over other players, it’s the fact that the whole progression system is based around their use. You level up classes as you play, but all this does is unlock things like extra card slots. In order to actually gain a new ability or buff you have to obtain it randomly from a loot box.


The game turns this into a horribly complex affair involving three kinds of in-game currency and constantly quitting out to the main menu to actually buy and open the boxes. All of this would be extremely irritating and non-intuitive even if everything was free. But it’s not.

EA has added a few safeguards since the initial fan protests, and lowered the prices for unlocking hero characters, but the fact remains that if you spend a lot of money just buying loot boxes with real money, rather than earning in-game currency, you get an immediate and significant advantage. (Although even when you buy a loot box with real money its contents are still random, so goodness help anyone that is both poor and unlucky.)

Whenever you die you’re shown exactly what star cards the other person is using, which EA presumably thought would be helpful and/or an incentive to get more of your own. But when you see you’ve been killed by someone with ultra rare and super powerful cards you realise you never really had a chance, especially as anyone playing at the moment clearly hasn’t had time to obtain them just by playing.

This problem is mitigated slightly in Starfighter Assault, because flying around in 3D space is not a common skill requirement in modern games and so those that are good at it can more easily turn the tables. But in the ground-based modes getting killed again and again becomes a deeply depressing experience where you begin to blame every mistake on loot boxes, whether it was their fault or not.

Star Wars: Battlefront II (PS4) – not even Yoda can defeat the evil of loot boxes

The whole progression system is completely poisonous to the game experience. The system is unfair by design, and for the sole purpose of trying to tempt people into spending more money on loot boxes than they ever would on the game alone or a season pass. And just saying that you won’t use them means nothing, because as long as other people do there can never be any such thing as a fair fight.


And it’s all such a terrible shame given the decent single-player, and excellent Starfighter Assault. The ground modes, including the centrepiece Galactic Assault, do have their own unique problems though, in part because of the unremarkable gunplay and slower movement compared to most other online shooters.

The character classes seem very much shoehorned in, as a simplistic attempt to counter claims that the original was too shallow. They’re also undermined by the loot boxes, as playing all the time as one particular class gains you almost nothing – since the contents of the loot boxes are still random, except for at specific milestones.

The ground combat is still undeniably entertaining though, with a variety of different objectives for each Galactic Assault map and a wide range of other modes, including the return of Heroes vs Villains and an Arcade mode against computer-controlled enemies.

As much as some people didn’t like it, the first Battlefront’s biggest sin was being a bit simplistic and light on content. By comparison, the sequel is so problematic it raises serious questions about the end of video games as we know it.

And while that sounds like hyperbole it absolutely is not. If you’re competing in a game and the primary factor which determines whether you win or lose is how much money you’ve spent then what you’re left with isn’t a first person shooter it’s a fruit machine.

If you stop yourself from spending any money on loot boxes, and try not to think too much about the unfairness of it all, then there’s no pretending that Battlefront II can’t be a lot of fun.

But as Yoda himself warned, once you start down the dark path forever will it dominate your destiny. And that should be taken as not just a warning to individual gamers, but to developers, publishers, and the video games industry at large.

Star Wars: Battlefront II In Short: A solid online shooter ruined by thoughtless corporate greed, whose malign practises could damage the whole of gaming if they are not kept in check. Pros: Superb graphics and amazing attention to Star Wars detail. Starfighter Assault is excellent and the story mode is a good effort. Plenty of game modes. Cons: Offensively cynical (and fiddly) progression system, whose reliance on luck and microtransactions destroys all sense of fairness. Mediocre gunplay. Score: 6/10

Formats: PlayStation 4 (reviewed), Xbox One, and PC

Price: £59.99

Publisher: EA

Developer: DICE, Criterion, and Motive

Release Date: 17th November 2017

Age Rating: 16

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