Boy oh boy this one is frustrating. The first 2 Star Wars Battlefront games were a huge part of my childhood. I remember coming home from school, loading up a massive instant action playlist and playing until my TV time was up. When rumors around a possible port of the games began surfacing I had high hopes, both have their strengths and weaknesses, and the PC versions had issues of their own (though years of mods could fix some of these) I really just wanted a way to quickly boot up the original duology and play them on a modern platform. In that way, this collection somewhat succeeds.
Starting this on switch immediately flooded me with nostalgia right down to the profile creation. However, upon jumping into the first game's campaign, I instantly noticed something wrong with the loading sound effects, a portent of what was to come. That said, this was running at a smooth 60fps, and was scaled mostly well to 1080p. Other than that, the game played almost exactly as I remembered, wrinkles and all, but some things looked a little off. This continued once I moved over to Battlefront 2 where certain textures were detached from level geometry, and at the beginning of certain matches, several frames would drop for a few seconds. That said, the game is still playable, largely unupgraded, but I wasnt looking for an upgrade. Unfortunately, the online efforts were near non-existent, with there barely being any servers, and said servers being completely unpopulated after a few days, and the performance on BF2 while in online just being absolutely awful is unacceptable.
This last point is a more personal thing, while I definitely wanted the game to be faithful to what came before, I also thought this would have been a perfect opportunity to fix issues that plagued the original, namely the dumb AI, and the overly aggressive aim assist. Another thing would be that BF1 has air combat on ground maps, and BF2 substituted that with just having space maps, but this would have been a perfect opportunity to port some of that over. Finally, I think it would have been a good opportunity to bring some of the content from the PSP games, and for $35, I think its fair to expect more. However, at the end of the day, the bare minimum is what I expect of Aspyr, and they seemingly cant even do that.
As of today, Aspyr have announced a patch that will be addressing several of these issues, and hopefully returning to this later will prove to be worthwhile.
Starting this on switch immediately flooded me with nostalgia right down to the profile creation. However, upon jumping into the first game's campaign, I instantly noticed something wrong with the loading sound effects, a portent of what was to come. That said, this was running at a smooth 60fps, and was scaled mostly well to 1080p. Other than that, the game played almost exactly as I remembered, wrinkles and all, but some things looked a little off. This continued once I moved over to Battlefront 2 where certain textures were detached from level geometry, and at the beginning of certain matches, several frames would drop for a few seconds. That said, the game is still playable, largely unupgraded, but I wasnt looking for an upgrade. Unfortunately, the online efforts were near non-existent, with there barely being any servers, and said servers being completely unpopulated after a few days, and the performance on BF2 while in online just being absolutely awful is unacceptable.
This last point is a more personal thing, while I definitely wanted the game to be faithful to what came before, I also thought this would have been a perfect opportunity to fix issues that plagued the original, namely the dumb AI, and the overly aggressive aim assist. Another thing would be that BF1 has air combat on ground maps, and BF2 substituted that with just having space maps, but this would have been a perfect opportunity to port some of that over. Finally, I think it would have been a good opportunity to bring some of the content from the PSP games, and for $35, I think its fair to expect more. However, at the end of the day, the bare minimum is what I expect of Aspyr, and they seemingly cant even do that.
As of today, Aspyr have announced a patch that will be addressing several of these issues, and hopefully returning to this later will prove to be worthwhile.