How Battlefront gets Star Wars right

Star Wars Battlefront is interesting – so far, I might add, before it is inevitably ruined by people, developers, or both – because it doesn't just try and slavishly replicate the movies' most obvious elements: it attempts to interpret them. Sure, there's John Williams' score, and blasters and X-Wings and Hoth and Darth Vader and Luke and those mounted guns that look like weaponised satellite dishes. But we've had all that before, to varying degrees of success. (Remember Shadows of the Empire! Yes! What happened in mission five? Exactly.) Battlefront works because it uses those things as the jumping off point, as a baseline, to enable the player to do Really Cool Shit within the context of the established Star Wars universe, albeit in a minor role rather than positioning them as the focal point.

Players of Battlefront are part participants, part excited onlookers: they have a direct stake in the outcome, but are also afforded a panoramic view of the action (rendered in best-ever fidelity), able to take in the scale, the incidents, the incidental. And not just any action, but a scene which has taken on an almost mythological bent, as much a proving ground for new games technology as it is Star Wars' most famous battle. We've played Hoth before, but usually as the star – by pulling back out and casting players as grunts, we're shown the periphery, something the films always excelled at. We watch it as much as we play it.

It maintains the first three films' (particularly the original, even if this beta takes its cues from Empire) energy: 'faster, more intense' is the much thrown-around George Lucas maxim, and while it is both of these, Battlefront also captures Star Wars' great appeal: constantly throwing players (or viewers) into situations of imaginative spectacle on a scale rarely seen, and not just sustaining it, but escalating it. Battlefront also nails the series' sense of knock-about action, where danger is everywhere but 'death' – violent, sudden – usually isn't. You don't die, you are 'defeated'. When a hero character goes over they kneel down rather than have their head forcibly detached from their shoulders. (Yes, this looks weird. They should probably just backflip out of the battle or something.) Enemy soldiers pirouette when hit, cartwheeling like a minor actor applying for a role in the A-Team. For a game about killing as many things as possible, it rarely feels actually violent, more a fantastic adventure where sometimes you might respawn somewhere else.

Star Wars and its sequels at their best are distilled excitement, and Battlefront interprets this perfectly, on its Hoth level at least. Hoth is Star Wars at its essence: superb visual and sound design, frenetic action, a sense of gradually building momentum. It moves quickly, with constantly-changing stakes. Battlefront captures this perfectly, with besieged Rebels under the cosh for most of the Walker Assault map, albeit with the chance of pulling it out of the bag (via the medium of crowd-pleasing tow-cabling) right at the very end. Star Wars has a history of minor characters taking on massive significance: Fett, Wedge, Mon Mothma, Ackbar, etc, etc. You are a minor character here, and it's all the better for it. When DICE talks about Star Wars moments, this is what it means, even if teabagging and grenade spam weren't that prevalent in the films.

Grunt status also makes the hero characters so appealing, whether you're playing as them or watching them from afar. When Vader in particular enters the fray there's a thrill, and a palpable danger that's not present elsewhere. Our very own Jim was right when he told me that after years of de-fanging, seeing Vader on the battlefield smashing people to bits and scattering scared troops reminds us of the power that character used to have. He's not a kid here, or an old man, or a fucking ghost, he's a black flash of death across a blinding white background. The power this conveys when you get to 'be' him is immense.

And that's what Battlefront's Hoth level (as well as some other attempts over the years) does so well: getting at the core of Star Wars. It does other stuff less well: spawns are shite, there are questions over the balancing, and the hands/cards system irritates (just call them perks, you dicks). We'll see if the more major stuff gets fixed, but in the meantime the 'this isn't Battlefront' crowd may be right. But it is Star Wars.