’Battlefront II’ Knows What Makes a Good Star Wars Game—It Already Was One

When Star Wars: Battlefront II launches this November, it's going to have steep competition—not from its fellow holiday releases, but its decade-old namesake. The original Star Wars: Battlefront II, which came out in 2005 (and was the sequel to a game that in turn set up a 2015 franchise reboot), was pure fan service, welded to a set of cleverly tuned game systems that borrowed liberally from some of the best multiplayer shooters out there circa 2005. Fans, myself included, hold it up as the Platonic ideal of a multiplayer Star Wars game.

The most exciting thing about the new version of Battlefront II is that it seems to agree.

Revisiting the original *Battlefront II *now, 12 years later, it feels in many ways like just an average multiplayer shooter, copying the mechanics and rhythms of the ultra-popular Battlefield games and pasting them into space. Yet, the game pulled off that command-V with "match destination formatting" enabled—and did so with such love that it managed to transcend its pedestrian shortcomings. Its vision of Star Wars was broad and accessible, yet contained all the hyper-detailed devotion of the nerdiest Wookiepedia reader.

Even better, Battlefront II was the ultimate set of Star Wars action figures: Any fight across the cinematic franchise could be re-enacted, remixed, and reversed. The game's substantive Galactic Conquest mode let you play out the films' major conflicts like a board game, moving fleets around the galaxy and engaging in strategic matches in order to take control of planets and the hyperspace lanes between them. Even the messy sprawl of the saga's Clone Wars became an epic setpiece.