Audio
It's Star Wars, so you're already onto a winner. John Williams' legendary score? Check. Vooming lightsabers and crackling blaster bolts whizzing about the place? Check. What more do you want?
Visuals
Pandemic's Star Wars Battlefront games looked great twenty years ago, but, in 2024, they don't really hold up all that well. Aspyr's remaster job, meanwhile, is rudimentary, at best.
Playability
This is where Battlefront has still got it – on a fundamental level, these are still great games, and they still play remarkably well, even two decades on.
Delivery
Even after a fairly hefty patch, Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection still has its fair share of bugs, and the online multiplayer experience is poor. There's clearly work to be done.
Achievements
A properly rubbish list. The whole thing is almost exclusively involves earning ranks, medals, and status, save for one or two achievements. Just dull as dishwater.
April 02, 2024
I have fond memories of whiling away hours on end playing Star Wars Battlefront II, back in 2005, having missed out on the first game for reasons that now escape me twenty years on. A lack of funds, probably. Whatever the case, you can now play both the original Star Wars Battlefront and its sequel via this remastered bundle – what a time to be alive. The Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection arrives with more than a few caveats, however, whether it's shaky multiplayer servers, a smattering of bugs, or the simple fact that these are the most rudimentary of remasters. Really, both games deserve better.
While the bump in resolution is, of course, enormously welcome, the overall visual quality is lacking - you could fire up the 2004 original and its 2005 sequel and fail to notice a major difference. Evidently, the last twenty years haven't been all that kind to Star Wars Battlefront when it comes to looks. Gameplay-wise, however, developer Pandemic's duology holds up rather well, boasting a more sandbox feel than its modern successors. Being able to jump straight into and out of vehicles is far more immediate and seamless than in EA and DICE's games, while the space battles are a bit of a highlight. There's something appealingly unfussy about how galactic warfare plays out in Battlefront, which is one of the reasons both games are still eminently playable.
It's a shame, then, that Aspyr, the studio tasked with remastering two hallowed Star Wars titles that live so large in the memory, has fallen short here. Breathing new life into beloved games such as these was never going to be easy, but the Classic Collection can't help but feel like an own goal – the single-player campaign offers some straightforward, fairly throwaway fun, leaving online multiplayer to do the heavy lifting when it comes to longevity, and, on that front, it simply fails to deliver. Once you've dispensed with the Clone Wars and Galactic Civil War campaigns in the first game, and both the Galactic Republic and Galactic Empire sides of the Battlefront II campaign, there's little reason to come back for more.
The primary saving grace here is that Pandemic did such a great job in the first place, so those same robust shooter mechanics are still great, whether you're playing in first or third-person - you can toggle between perspectives on the fly, if you like, although there is a bug that causes the viewpoint to irritatingly shift back to the default of its own volition. Even if the visuals have aged quite poorly (sparse, flat environments; slightly crude character models by today's standards), the overall quality of the gameplay shines through, even if it is marred by annoying, niggling bugs. Regardless, the Classic Collection might just be the best way to play Stars Wars Battlefront I and II, in spite of its flaws. A rudimentary upgrade it may be, but an upgrade it is, nonetheless.
Pandemic's version of Battlefront succeeds in covering a lot of ground, too, from battle droids blasting Gungans on the plains of Naboo to fighting Wookiees on Kashyyyk, dogfighting with TIE fighters from the cockpit of an X-wing, or running around on a lightsaber-swishing rampage as a Jedi master or Sith Lord. As a Star Wars fan, it's the sort of wish fulfilment that felt almost brand new back in the mid aughts, and even now it still has the capacity to elicit glee. And while there's not much to the multiplayer push and pull beyond capturing spawn points and whittling down the enemy squad's reserves until they reach zero, this remains an accomplished Star Wars experience for a more civilised age.
While Aspyr has ultimately failed to give the original Star Wars Battlefront games their due, the Classic Collection presents a golden opportunity to revisit and enjoy two excellent Star Wars shooters that have stood the test of time, even if its visual sheen has diminished somewhat over the last two decades. Yet, as an expansive celebration of all things Star Wars (up until the end of Return of the Jedi, at least), Pandemic's beloved two Battlefront efforts fulfil their remit, and the Classic Collection provides an adequate, though disappointing, way to revisit two bygone gems.