[Gamers' Day 2007] Going Renegade
Can Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron finally bring the series to portables in proper fashion? We go hands-on to find out.
Published: May 17, 2007
It was awfully smart of LucasArts to hand their baby over to the capable hands of Pandemic Studios. The developers took the Star Wars license and ran with it, creating Star Wars: Battlefront, one of the best online experiences found on consoles and a direct appropriation of the core stuff that made games like Battlefield 2 so damn fun on the PC. It worked, and worked beautifully, becoming the best selling Star Wars game in history, and though the sequel was more of the same, it still sold like crazy.
Which is probably why someone thought it would work on the PSP. Take the basic gameplay and whittle it down a little more, make it online when few PSP games were, what could go wrong, right? Except it was a bit of a dud. A marginally fun dud and one that is currently the second best-selling game ever on the PSP, but a gameplay dud nonetheless. With Pandemic busy with their own projects, it now falls to the talented team at Rebellion and their Asura Engine to see if they can bottle the lightning that made the console versions so good with Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron.
And so the old game was scrapped, replaced by a new one that's built exclusively from the ground up for the PSP rather than being a port of existing content (though obviously the gameplay is mostly identical). Rebellion is throwing in a fairly deep character customization system, allowing you to bolt on unique abilities, weapons load outs, decals (which are mirrored on any ships you fly), species (and body parts therein) and so on for a little extra personalization, but the core of the game, that capture and hold dynamic that worked so well, is still here and, from what we played, still quite fun -- if a little early (the framerate had some issues and there was some odd collision at times).
And it's not like Rebellion and LucasArts have forgotten what made the first PSP game attractive either. The Galactic Conquest Mode, an almost Risk-like game of controlling territory wrapped around the basic main game concept, is coming back, and the game does of course support the iconic heroes from the movies (incidentally, Han plays a big role in this game, as you're a recruit into his "Renegade Squadron," hence the title and all the create-a-character options), bearing in mind that this game actually takes place as part of loose cannon between Episode III, the last of the "new" movies and Episode IV, the "first" movie.
Oh, and since you're probably wondering, yes, the game is [i]of course online, with up to 16 players at at a time via Infrastructure mode and up to 8 locally via Ad-Hoc. Considering how promising this one is, Rebellion's track record with other developers'/publishers' licenses and the fact that the game is going to sell like crazy no matter how bad it is, we're guessing this is a title we'd better keep an eye on. It's less than two months to E3, and we're guessing we'll see it again there.
Which is probably why someone thought it would work on the PSP. Take the basic gameplay and whittle it down a little more, make it online when few PSP games were, what could go wrong, right? Except it was a bit of a dud. A marginally fun dud and one that is currently the second best-selling game ever on the PSP, but a gameplay dud nonetheless. With Pandemic busy with their own projects, it now falls to the talented team at Rebellion and their Asura Engine to see if they can bottle the lightning that made the console versions so good with Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron.
And so the old game was scrapped, replaced by a new one that's built exclusively from the ground up for the PSP rather than being a port of existing content (though obviously the gameplay is mostly identical). Rebellion is throwing in a fairly deep character customization system, allowing you to bolt on unique abilities, weapons load outs, decals (which are mirrored on any ships you fly), species (and body parts therein) and so on for a little extra personalization, but the core of the game, that capture and hold dynamic that worked so well, is still here and, from what we played, still quite fun -- if a little early (the framerate had some issues and there was some odd collision at times).
And it's not like Rebellion and LucasArts have forgotten what made the first PSP game attractive either. The Galactic Conquest Mode, an almost Risk-like game of controlling territory wrapped around the basic main game concept, is coming back, and the game does of course support the iconic heroes from the movies (incidentally, Han plays a big role in this game, as you're a recruit into his "Renegade Squadron," hence the title and all the create-a-character options), bearing in mind that this game actually takes place as part of loose cannon between Episode III, the last of the "new" movies and Episode IV, the "first" movie.
Oh, and since you're probably wondering, yes, the game is [i]of course online, with up to 16 players at at a time via Infrastructure mode and up to 8 locally via Ad-Hoc. Considering how promising this one is, Rebellion's track record with other developers'/publishers' licenses and the fact that the game is going to sell like crazy no matter how bad it is, we're guessing this is a title we'd better keep an eye on. It's less than two months to E3, and we're guessing we'll see it again there.
