Retro Review: Star Wars: Battlefront II

First played: 2005 on PlayStation 2

Star Wars Battlefront II remains immensely popular and has a deserved reputation as one of the all-time greatest Star Wars games. With a third entry in the series finally coming out thanks to EA and DICE, how does the previous title hold up?

Battlefront II’s game modes take place both the original and prequel trilogies across single and multi-player with the campaign, titled Rise of the Empire following the 501^st Legion’s career in both the Clone Wars and later the Galactic Empire; it’s a simple story, but surprisingly it manages to be engaging with Temuera Morrison’s (Who played Jango Fett in Attack of the Clones) narrations drawing you into to each mission, which in turn tie in well with series canon and even provide some insight into what the Empire was up to in the twenty years leading up to “A New Hope”. But following the canon as with every Star Wars game does force the campaign’s length down to around five or six hours max. The enemy AI is also quite inconsistent, sometimes enemies will run right past you, shoot the ground, or suddenly turn their attention to you with sudden accuracy, making it poor preparation for online play. Fortunately the game still has plenty to do beyond the story; across all modes, you’ll earn medals which (after much perseverance) will unlock upgraded weapons and bonuses for your character and then there’s Galactic Conquest. Adding a twist of strategy to the mix, GC pits the player and their fleet(s) against an opposing force for control of planets; winning battles will capture worlds, whilst losing will force your side to retreat. The game also adds boosters to vary the combat further such as enhanced weapon damage or the appearance of a hero or villain on the battlefield. It’s a long-lasting mode, but it begs for an option to play it online. What you will get online is a strong-standing multiplayer component offering up to 64 player galactic warfare across a huge number of maps. All players can host their own servers and join games via a buddy list; the latter could have used some tightening up as the only way to add buddies is to join the same server they are on. Battlefront II isn’t quite as organised as its modern contemporaries but terms of sheer chaotic online fun, the game delivers quite well.

In a similar way to EA’s Battlefield series, Battlefront II is all about playing as a team with the different classes through either first or third person (my preferred viewpoint!); soldiers are built for direct combat, heavy troopers target vehicles, marksman take aim from afar and engineers provide support through repair. But where Battlefront differs from other games of its kind is with its special units; the Clones, Droids (CIS), Rebels and Empire each have their own unique units which really add a spice of variety to the proceedings including the rolling destroyer droids (CIS) and the jet packing Dark Troopers (Empire). In addition to returning vehicles to commandeer, Battlefront II also added heroes and villains and fully-fledged space combat. Playing as a hero or villain is a fun and balanced novelty, although after a while it doesn’t feel too much different from standard infantry. Space combat on the other hand is very enjoyable and deep; the factions have four types of vessels specialising in dogfights (TRI Fighter), bombing (V-Wing), transport (Imperial Landing Craft) and a well balanced mix of the former (X-Wing); battles take place between capital ships, both of which can be boarded and have specific weak points to exploit. Each aspect of the game is simple to get into but also requires a degree of skill to master and aside from some cheap tactics where force powers are concerned, Battlefront II remains a mostly enjoyable and tactical experience.

Star Wars Battlefront may have some problems with its AI and a brief campaign but it does what no Star Wars game that came before it could; it absorbs and invests the player into the battlefields of George Lucas’s sci-fi epic better than any other game based on the licence, making them feel like one cog in a giant machine.

My recommendation: Get it on PC if you can; the multiplayer servers are still running and it’s often very cheap on Steam.

Retro Rating: 8/10

Godzilla 2014 Movie Review

Since his debut in 1954, the legendary Godzilla has starred in numerous films, proving that he is indeed, “King of the monsters”. But the giant nuclear Japanese beast hasn’t been seen in a western flick since 1998. Godzilla 2014 is bent on righting the previous wrongs of Emmerich’s 1998 flop but ultimately all it amounts to is an even more lacklustre effort.

The titular monster may be in the title but unexpectedly and rather disappointingly, Godzilla follows the story of the Brody family and their endeavours with other humans to deal with the entrance of a giant monster. Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) loses his wife in a catastrophic nuclear station failure but deduces that the tragedy was not caused by man or weather but an unforeseen force. Flash forward fifteen years and Joe’s son Ford (Aaron-Taylor Johnson) is thrust into the chaos with Godzilla and two MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms) facing off. Right from the start, it’s Godzilla so surely you’d expect some gargantuan battles to take place throughout the film. Regretfully the film contains hardly any of that and instead focuses on the humans talking and partaking in every kind of generic military fare whilst the monsters take an insulting back seat. It’s not always a bad thing to focus on the humans in a monster movie, as proven by 2008’s Cloverfield, but when almost every character is so meaningless and so under-developed, it is all too evident that this is a film where very little happens until the final act and even that is too brief to meet the quota for a monster brawl. Godzilla seems to appear out of nowhere in the film and because of shots of the creature’s back at the beginning of the film, there’s hardly any tension built throughout the film as we know he’ll show up at some point anyway. At least the 1998 film actually delivered in terms of action, and revealed the monster fairly well, however bogged down it was by terrible acting. It’s as if the film studio ran out of money making the effects for the final battle and figured that they had to throw in a heap of unrelated material that strays too far from the film’s premise. Rather than watching a Godzilla movie, it felt more like another “Battle: Los Angeles” at numerous points. With a plot as off the rails as this, they may as well have renamed the film “Call of Duty: Monsters Unleashed”.

The film’s focus on the humans, as opposed to the monsters attempts to bring some emotion to the proceedings but it only ends up serving a terribly conceived distraction that endlessly gets in the way and undermines the little action that takes place. Young Brody and his family are the same old group in peril who have been done to death in most disaster and military movies before and whenever they’re on screen you’ll just be counting down the minutes before the monsters come on again. Dr Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) TRIES to relay and relate some modern themes such as the use of nuclear power but really all he’s doing is spouting dialogue which doesn’t receive any kind of payoff. Speaking of a lack of payoffs, there’s Bryan Cranston, who has been utterly wasted on this film; his character’s internal conflict over the loss of his wife is by far the most interesting thread in the film. But what happens then? He is killed off only a third into the movie without any proper conclusion to his arc. The rest of the characters are pure fluff, only present to play out the same tired militaristic situations seen in countless other films. What it comes down to is that you simply don’t care about the characters one bit, which only serves to magnify the film’s failed and fundamentally flawed approach to focus on the humans, rather than the monster rumble we were all expecting to see in a film titled “Godzilla”.

Legendary Pictures take on the classic monster may suffer from an identity crisis and have some painfully under-developed human characters but at least it looks the part. Monster based destruction has never looked better in a Hollywood blockbuster. Buildings burn, piles of rubble are everywhere; it all works to highlight the destructive nature of the creatures. And then there’s Godzilla himself; Edwards and company have truly nailed the look and feel of Toho’s monster this time around. He’s much more bulky, stands upright and breathes his trademark nuclear breath (which gives way to some sumptuous lighting effects). The music is also solid, providing sweeping notes whenever the monsters are brawling. The editing is well done, providing a huge sense of scale whenever Godzilla is on screen, though ironically many shots also emphasise the film’s biggest problem; often times you will see the monsters stomping around in the distance or fighting but then the camera will either pan or cut to the humans, resulting in many moments of frustration for the majority of us who came to see a monster brawl. All told the visual elements of Godzilla are great, but they really don’t stand a chance of saving the film as a whole.

Godzilla tries to be the big budget Hollywood monster movie we were all hoping for but it is instead a crushing disappointment that only becomes half decent in the final twenty minutes. At the very least it does get the monster right where the 1998 version failed to do so but the film’s baffling focus on the people rather than the titular character brings it crashing down.

Rating: 2/5 Stars

Grand Theft Auto 5 Game Review (PS3)

The Grand Theft Auto series (if the one billion dollar profit in just three days is anything to go by) is perhaps the biggest and most popular video game franchise of all time. With each new release from one generation to the next, Rockstar has consistently outdone itself. Grand Theft Auto 5 returns the series to the west coast rendition of Los Angeles and it is, by all accounts the best game ever put out by the company.

The city in question, Los Santos in the present day, plays host to not one but three tales of Michael, Franklin and Trevor; very different men who come together to solve each other’s problems in the crime business and ultimately pull off a collection of high risk, high reward heists that could set them up for life. Michael is a retired bank robber who has in a sense, reached the American Dream, owning a top-of-the-line property and having started a family; but Michael doesn’t feel like he reached anything, with his family hating him and his trips to therapy resulting in little success. Young street-hustler Franklin is on the other side of the coin, starting off in a similar position to CJ from 2005’s GTA San Andreas on Grove Street; he seeks to make a luxury life for himself and in a chance meeting, finds himself taken in by Michael. Then there’s Trevor; a “friend” from Michael’s past who eventually hears word of the former’s exploits and comes looking for a piece of the action. Trevor is a complete nutcase, endlessly engaging in felonies of the worst kind; he’s such a loathsome piece of work yet ironically he’s the embodiment of the players who just want to go on an all-out rampage against the law at every opportunity. The plot proceeds just like any GTA would, with the protagonists crossing paths with a range of colourful characters and the criminal schemes gradually escalating into full-blown capers along the way. Grand Theft Auto 5’s story is much more light-hearted than its predecessor, piling on the satire and controversy in greater amounts. Rather than placing a primary focus on one man’s claim to the American Dream, the game tackles some heavy topics in an attempt to push the boundaries of what is accepted in the medium. Some of this will no doubt offend some including mistreatment of women, economic crisis, corruption in government and the use of torture. The latter is personified in a very graphic mission featuring Trevor which was quite uncomfortable to play through. The light-hearted tone also gives way to more humour, culminating in an entertaining story which will definitely satisfy those who just want to play and forget about the thread tying it together. But if you compare it with GTA 4, it’s definitely a step back from one of the best stories in the medium; the trio’s hunt for wealth isn’t memorable as Niko’s quest for revenge and the three characters aren’t really as likeable because of their confined archetypes and reduced realism.

Grand Theft Auto 5 is simply the biggest open world game ever created; the state of Los Santos is bigger than Grand Theft 4’s Liberty City, and Red Dead Redemption’s valley put together and at every turn the landscape is like a giant piñata just bursting with things to do. 69 story missions comprise the game’s story but completing all of these only amounts to around fifty percent of the experience. GTA 5’s three playable characters are let loose in the entirety of Los Santos from the get-go to take on missions, search for items and participate in far too many side activities to count. Each of the characters possess their own money balance, wardrobe, property, vehicles and weapons, meaning that you’ll have to raise funds and buy items for each character separately. With the realism of Grand Theft Auto 4 gone, the customisation elements from past games have made a welcome return; guns (which range from pistols to a massive mini-gun) can be customised with sights, scopes, colours and other attachments. Likewise cars can be fitted with engines for increased speed, tyres for better handling and even armour for brushes with the law. Planes and the Rhino Tank are also back along with a submarine, allowing players to freely venture beneath the waves for the first time. The characters also have their own special abilities; Michael can slow down time to rack up headshots, Franklin can slow down time whilst in a vehicle to make turns silky smooth and Trevor can fly into rage mode where he takes less damage and dishes out more to enemies. The special abilities are just one of many aspects that feed into the returning RPG elements. The more shooting, sneaking, driving, athletics and flying the characters do, the better they will get at each skill; this goes hand-in-hand with the side activities which offer endless opportunities to boost skills. Michael can take part in tennis or triathlons to boost his stamina, Franklin might go to the shooting ranges and flying schools to raise shooting and flying or Trevor could go around getting into random fist fights to prop up his strength.

All of these additions really add to the game’s depth which is complimented by the improvements to gameplay and that’s before we get to the missions themselves, which are by far the best they’ve ever been in the series. Each character gets their moments of glory with Trevor’s mid-flight assault and hijack of a cargo jet, Michael chasing a target across airport runways and many more will leave a brilliant impression over the course of the game. But the heists are where the game really pushes the open world game over the top; building on the success of GTA 4’s Bank of Liberty Robbery, the heists are multi-staged missions which involve choosing a method and crew, making preparations and then executing with all three characters working together. Depending on the crew and approach you select, the heist may not go according to plan but at the same time you also have to consider how much of the money each crew member will take home. It’s a new highly unpredictable kind of mission design which offers full replayability, along with every other mission thanks to the mission replay option in the pause menu. Each major mission and side mission has a bronze, silver and gold rank which will continue to bring players back for months to come.

If that isn’t enough then the fully fledged multiplayer mode, GTA Online will more than suffice. Rockstar has really gone all-out to improve the online aspects of its crime simulator. You start by creating your own character with some extensive options (who is also selectable from the single-player mode), and choose their lifestyle, which will determine your starting skills and from there you can jump straight into either standard matches, or just free roam around the Los Santos with 15 other players, ranking up as you go and raising money to buy properties that cannot be found in the main game. While this is a bit of a disappointing number, considering the size of the map, this is redeemed by the new mission editor. From the multiplayer menu, players can enter any part of the map and conjure up any kind of mission they fancy from new variants on standard modes to outright ridiculous race courses and everything in between. If your mission is a solid fit, Rockstar may potentially add it to the playlists for all players to see. More customisation options are being put out in the months to come with even brand new heists making their way into the mode. There are still a few technical problems with lag, particularly when taking the passenger seat in another player’s car but less than a year from release, GTA Online still has heaps of potential and is only set to get better with time.

Grand Theft Auto 5’s gameplay picks up where its predecessor left off, continuing to refine and polish to a fine sheen. The cover system introduced in the previous game is now much more responsive, resulting in less sticking to the wrong piece of the environment in gunfights. A weapon wheel is now available, slowing down time to make choosing the right armament much easier and engaging a character’s special ability is as simple as clicking the two analog sticks together. Driving has received a much needed boost with the vehicles with the car handling being much more accessible this time around, although it can still be quite fiddly trying to aim weapons while driving at the same time. Planes and helicopters are fairly challenging to drive until the characters visit flight school. The numerous mini-games players can take part in have all sorts of control schemes tied to them, but the game is very helpful with its tutorials, ensuring that players can get into the side-activities easily without fumbling around with the controls. The law enforcement of Los Santos has also undergone a slight change; players can still evade the police by escaping the immediate area but that puts you at risk of running into other patrolling officers; if players pay attention to the police sight cones and stay out of them, they can be right next to the authorities and still escape just fine. Enemy AI has never really been a major strength of the series but in GTA 5, enemies will do their best to find cover and you’ll often face many at once. Thankfully the game has (finally!) added mid-mission checkpoints, drastically reducing the frustration levels in every mission. As the most refined game in the series to date, Grand Theft Auto 5 is an immensely enjoyable game to play and a testament to Rockstar’s undeniable ability to fly higher with every new release.

Just like the gameplay, Grand Theft Auto 5 boasts the series best graphic look to date. Los Santos, as I mentioned before is a big place, packed with a great variety of different environments including deserts, mountains and lakes in addition to the main city. The character models have also received an uplift with better facial expressions and more believable animations. The weather effects also look great, with stunning sunsets and detailed weather effects consistently rolling in to immerse the player. The soundtrack is once again stellar with a huge amount of memorable tracks from the 80s, 90s and modern times. With all that said, the game isn’t the greatest looking title out there; a couple of mild glitches here and there such as characters clipping into objects, and disappearing objects can be a little distracting. Despite these issues, the game still runs well and the voice acting is top-notch, brilliantly putting across the humour and satire in the story.

Grand Theft Auto 5 may not have the best narrative in a video game, nor does it push current hardware to the limit but the vast majority of places where this game delivers are simply off the charts, delivering the all-time best standards in mission design and open world gameplay. The game will undoubtedly go down as Rockstar’s crowning achievement in their prestigious and downright unstoppable career in the industry.

Rating: 9.5/10