Yesterday marked the official end of the Star Wars Battlefront Beta!  It was truly an exciting game, but there are many things that I personally found wrong with it.  While it's very much your authentic Star Wars type game, there were certainly more than a few times I grew very frustrated with it.

The Good:

Let's start off with the good though as it was still fun despite my frustrations.  Graphics!  Whether you're on PS4, PC, or Xbox One, these were amazing.  From all the streams I saw, the videos posted online, to when I was playing, the graphics were just a work of art.  The textures were phenomenal and it looked almost real.  The physics as you run around in third person looked very close to real life.  Alongside the graphics were the special effects.  Picture the Star Wars movie when a blaster hits a surface and the laser bursts into many tiny dots, or the sparks that come off the surface.  That's exactly how it looked in the game.  The explosions looked as if you were playing the movie itself.

The game play itself was also very good, it had a realistic feel to it.  Whether you were on the ground, or in a vehicle, it felt like you were unable to break the laws of physics.  The vehicles, especially flying felt like they became second nature very quickly.  It was an easy thing to pick up and get right into the action.  Some vehicles handled differently than others, for example, the X-Wing by far was my favorite ship.  Where as, the A-Wing, still a good ship due to it's speed and power, was much harder to control.  You were unable to fly it upside down as efficiently as the X-Wing or a Tie Fighter.

The Dark Side: The Bad:

Now for some of the bad, the spawning.  Every time you spawn in Hoth, you were typically set to two spawn points which rotated between each other.  As the Imperials, this felt like you had to walk the longest way to get back into the battle.  On the Rebel side, you felt the pain of having the same feeling.  While it felt like you had to walk a good ways to get back into the fight, it's nice that enemies didn't spawn directly on top of or behind you.  That being said, as the "uplink" points moved, so did the spawns.  If you had a bad timed spawn, you may notice some Imperials or Rebel's may spawn right on top of you or behind you.  This wasn't a one in a million chance either, it would happen pretty often if you died at the right time.  Which let's be honest, it happens a lot, at least to me, maybe I'm unlucky, I'm not sure.

Another gripe I have is the amount of vehicles the Imperials had over the Rebels.  I know you could only get to level 5 and thus only had a slim choice of weapons, so the Rebel's didn't have any "anti-tank" essentially, so that made that match much more difficult.  Usually someone in an AT-ST would be murdering you're entire troop while Imperials in the Tie Fighter would be keeping your ships out of the sky.  This combination meant your ships were unable to support the ground troops and fire upon the AT-ST's making it a great mathematical formula for destruction.

Blasters by far as someone coming from the realistic shooting games with guns with bullets that travel much faster.  This was an issue for me that I never got fully adjusted to.  You have to make sure you shoot in front of someone if they are running to the side.  I also have my thoughts that latency may have been an issue because three head shots wouldn't kill an enemy, but one shot to my head was pretty much instant death.  Even if I had the drop of the enemy at some point, they would still manage to decimate me even if I had fired almost every shot into their chest/back before my gun was about to over heat.

Matchmaking: Not terrible, but good luck getting to play with your friends.  Their system allowed you to have a single partner.  So if you or your partner joined a game, you were notified and prompted to join.  If you're just in a voice chat party, they show that too, but there's no notification.  You have to go select a name and select join game.  Is the game full?  Yes?  Well you can sit in queue until someone leaves.  Is the other team full?  No?  OK, you can play against your friend.  I think this feature still requires a little work unless they don't want more than two friends always playing on the same team or together at all?

The last thing I wish to mention by far urged me the most.  THE CLIPPING!  Mother of pearl this was the worst.  Nothing sucks more than trying to run and duck into cover and getting stuck on a rock or piece of snow no bigger than an ant.  Especially because of the various formations of rocks used on both maps that were available in the beta, clipping was typically the death of me if I was on the ground.  Hopefully EA will be able to smooth that over a bit before launch as I see that being a big issue down the road.

Final Thoughts:

All in all, Star Wars Battlefront seems like it's going to be a fun game.  As I said originally in another post I still wouldn't buy it.  Maybe it's because I'm not a big enough Star Wars fan to want to play a game and dedicate my time that way.  Maybe it's because I think back to Rainbow Six | Siege Beta and just wish I was still playing that.  I believe it was easier to play with friends in Rainbow Six where as there's no good way to get into matches with your friends on Battlefront.

If you're all about Star Wars, graphics, vehicles, essentially Battlefield with a Star Wars skin, this game is for you!  I would recommend it to a friend who was borderline on the edge because it is a fun game, don't get me wrong.  It's just not my kind of game.  From what I discussed, there was just more bad than good.  While good should always triumph as per Star Wars, I just don't think I would be happy with my purchase and continue to be entertained as time went on.

What do you think?  Are you planning to play Star Wars Battlefront when it releases?  Did you play the beta?  What are your thoughts on the graphics and the game play?  Leave a comment below with your thoughts or opinions!

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Yesterday I managed to snag a Star Wars Battlefront beta key for some early access beta (thanks to @asd81_) and needless to say, I've never played a game like it.  I wasn't exactly sure what to expect and I'm glad I didn't, because it was incredibly fun and exciting!

There's currently a multiplayer and a story type mission, but I have only jumped into multiplayer at this time so I'll provide my first impressions on that as I only played for a few hours yesterday.

Firstly, the max rank is only 5 and you're very limited on the blasters you have.  You also have star cards which you can use for your hand, with a total of 3 cards (one being an energy card) you can roll into battle.  My typical load out after getting to level 5 was using the heavy blaster along with a grenade, jet pack, and a personal shield.  However, in the first game I played, it was similar to hard point from Call of Duty.  A pod would appear on the map, you capture it and then defend it against the opposing team.  There's no super awesome or interesting things about this, it seems like it's just a warm up that you do until about level 5 when you're ready to go to Hoth.

Once you reach level 5 you're able to unlock all the items without having to worry about points or credits for the most part.  So I reached that point with ease and went into the bigger 20v20 match.  This match was much more intense as there was ground troops, X-wings, Tie Fighters, AT-AT's, AT-ST's, and even heros!  That's right, the Imperial forces had Darth Vadar, and the Rebels had Luke Skywalker.

All over the map there are power-ups around.  My usual first choice was a ship so I could fly around, take down enemy ships, and provide some ground support as I shot fiercely into clusters of troops from the opposing team.  The power-up system is simple, you run over one, hit L1+R1 and you're off.  Well unless you get shot while trying to call in your ship which happened more times than one.  But when I did manage to get in a ship it was incredible.  The system for flying was so much fun that it's all I wanted to do the entire time.  As soon as someone managed to shoot me down, I was finding the first power-up to give me another ship to get back into the sky's.

Of course I participated in the ground troop action where our objective was to either activate (Rebel) or deactivate/keep the transmitters off (Imperial).  Now, I'm typically use to an FPS with guns that shoot bullets.  I'm talking guns that will shoot a lot of bullets which travel at an extremely high velocity.  So as I'm trying out this beta, I can't help but get frustrated when I'm shooting and the blaster continues to shoot behind someone.  This is due to the speed or velocity at which the blaster round moves.  I'm told it's something I will get use to, but it's very frustrating and difficult to adapt to on the fly with no prior experience.

Either way, I would say it was a blast (pun intended).  I managed to get plenty of kills, and learn a lot about how the spawning system works.  Typically spawning isn't too bad, until the hanger on Hoth.  Feel free to check out my Twitch stream from the other night to see certain times where it's just a massacre.  But all in all, it was a ton of fun and I was extremely impressed.  Not only was I impressed by the game play and how authentic it felt being a Star Wars game, but the graphics were just amazing even on the PS4!

Now the open beta actually starts on Thursday which isn't even a full day away at this point, so I hope you're excited, because you're going to have a lot of fun if you like Star Wars, or shooting people with blasters, or flying, or force choking Rebel scum.  Today I plan to play some of the mission/story mode to see if it's any good, and then I will be jumping right back into multiplayer to get back into the amazing aerial acrobatics you can do while flying!

Overall first impression: this game is amazing but I probably won't buy it.  Would I recommend it to someone who would play it, yes.  However, I will most likely not be purchasing the game because there's too much else to play.  I will more than likely be playing Fallout 4 while waiting for Rainbow Six | Siege.  But if you like Star Wars and were looking forward to the game, I can promise you will not be disappointed!

Please feel free to leave a comment, like, or share this post with your friends or family.  Until next time, may the force be with you!

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