Star Wars Battlefront II
Yes, it's better, and yes, you need to play it.
Published: March 13, 2006
Space combat, initially, seems like a hectic, almost impossible sort of never-ending skirmish between capital ships. Unlike the planetside operations where you'll rarely have multiple objectives beyond capturing control points (accomplished by just standing next to them for an extended amount of time), space battles rely heavily on moving troops from your ship to the enemy's and then crawling into the guts of the ship and blowing the holy living hell out of everything.
Sure, you can hop into a ship (and if you're a pilot rather than just a regular grunt, you'll get the added bonus of being able to slowly repair any damage you take), and just duke it out in space, locking on and letting forth with everything the empire or resistance has to offer, but it's a chump's game, and the real advancement comes from grabbing a bomber or medium-class ship that can do light dogfighting but still strafe bigger targets, and just going to town.
Taking down the bigger ships is a multi-stage process that requires weakening the shields, attacking specific targets like big guns and dishes to cripple the offensive and defensive abilities of the other team, but the key will always be flying into their landing bay, hopping out and going to town on their critical life support and engine systems, which adds a sort of two-pronged see-saw act between repelling and advancing both inside and outside the big ships. It's the kind of serious gameplay addition the games needed, but it doesn't pop up too often offline.
You can try to force things a little more if you play Galactic Conquest, which lets you build up a fleet of ships and then hop around a grid-based galaxy to slowly conquer planets. It's really just a skin around which a very light strategy element is injected into the otherwise familiar mechanics, but the ability to build increasingly powerful fleets and send multiple ships out to attack is nice -- hell, you can even buy bonuses that will help your troops or hurt the enemy when it finally comes time to dive down into the conflict, but it's not a vastly different component from the regular single-player game.
Which brings us to the online portion, and normally I'd just do what I normally do and just go "it's pretty good, you should probably play it," but Battlefront II quite simply was designed to be an online experience. The offline component is stronger, no doubt, and you do actually get a nice sense of what the clone army had to go through as they knew the eventual outcome of the Jedi that fought alongside them against the droid armies, but to actually experience the addictive back and forth, you need the human component.
Since the game is so similar online or off, it comes down to the actual experience of playing. The community for the most part is far more newbie-friendly than other big PS2 shooters (I'm talking about you, SOCOM), but your mileage when connecting to a server will certainly vary. Lag, stuttery play, missing projectiles (you'll fire, but never see the actual shot hit anything) and a general lack of smoothness are things you'll run across unless you stick to dedicated servers that have a fairly strong upstream, and you'll need this too.
