So I recently picked up Star Wars Battlefront II for my PC. I own the original Battlefront, but I had gotten it after it had been out for a while, so I was excited to get one of these games at the beginning of its lifespan. I had also put all of my birthday money together, and picked up a brand spankin’ new ATi Radeon X850 PRO (256 MB AGP). Even though I got a much more powerful card (over my Radeon 9200), I can still safely say that Battlefront II puts you in the Star Wars battles like the first one never did.

So, what’s improved, you ask? Well, almost everything. Some of them are readily obvious, like the new space battles, or the reworked hero system, or the new classes (more on those later), but the other things that make it truly enjoyable. I’ll never forget the first time I dashed into a crowd of clones as General Grievous, and heard one of them shout, “Watch out for Grievous!” The voices have definitely been improved. The units can recognize pretty much all of the heroes, as well as many vehicles.

Speaking of heroes, being able to play as the Jedi or Sith is an absolute blast. The system is very well-done. When going by the default settings, the player doing the best after a certain amount of points have been gained is given a prompt to become the hero. If they accept, they are taken to the character select screen with the hero chosen. They can pick a command post to spawn at, then go to town. The hero has a much larger health bar than normal units, but it goes down slowly over time. Taking damage will act like it would for a normal unit, but the only way to recover health is to kill enemy units. Once the bar runs out, the player is taken back to the character select screen. It doesn’t count as a death.

Another thing I like is the new commander class. Once you get eight points, this class becomes available. Each commander has a more powerful weapon, and a bit more health. My personal favorite is the Clone Commander, with his chaingun.

The space battles are okay, but the teams don’t do much to defend their own ship from the enemy. I can land a ship in the enemy’s capital ship, and walk past a whole bunch of droids without them doing anything.

The realism is even more obvious because of my new graphics card. Before, I ran the game at 800 x 600 with shadows and lighting off, and texture quality at medium, with no antialiasing. Now I can pretty much crank the sliders to the max with the same performance.

Overall, I’m very happy with this game. I would have liked more control over how long the hero lasts for, as well as a bit more interesting space battles.

If you’re looking for a good FPS, you should probably consider this one.