Star Wars Battlefront 2’s Space Battles Are Faster than Ever

By Andrew Goldfarb

It’s easy to die in Star Wars Battlefront 2’s Starfighter Assault mode. In a few hands-on sessions, I succumbed to enemy fire multiple times, but also managed to crash into debris, explode against the side of enemy cruisers, and occasionally even collide with my own teammates.

Thankfully, even for someone terrible at dogfighting like me, Battlefront 2’s transitions between matches are now even faster, letting you pick your ship and see its abilities at a glance and jump right back into the action.

We only had a chance to try one map set above the planet Fondor, but tried out both the Rebel side (controlling X-Wings, A-Wings, and Y-Wings) and Empire (controlling TIE Fighters, Interceptors, and Bombers). Like in Battlefront, ships have different abilities like afterburner speed boosts and target locks that help make it feel like you can pick the ship that’s right for you.

Unlike Starfighter Assault in the first Battlefront, iconic ships like the Millennium Falcon or Slave I are no longer tied to tokens you find in the world. Instead, as you take down enemies or complete objectives, you’ll earn Battle Points that you can use to buy a special ship for a round.

This is a drastic improvement over Battlefront 1, and piloting Poe Dameron’s Black One or Darth Maul’s Scimitar after crashing my X-Wing or TIE Fighter was a welcome change of pace (plus a great chance to get revenge on the jerks that shot me down).

Unsurprisingly, Battlefront 2 still looks absolutely gorgeous, with ships that are straight out of the films and a framerate that held steady even in the middle of frantic battles. The sound design is also still spot on, with every laser shot and proton torpedo making exactly the noise it should.

Burnout and Need for Speed developer Criterion Games is working on Starfighter Assault, and the studio’s vehicle expertise shines through with controls that are more responsive than they were the first time around, allowing for far more precision as you’re evading enemies or chasing after a target. While sensitivity during our demo was dialed a little higher than I’d like, I was still able to pull off much tighter maneuvers that probably would have sent me careening into a wall in the first Battlefront.

Starfighter Assault seems extremely promising, and fixes a lot of the problems I had with the mode in the first Battlefront. The presence of ships from all three Star Wars trilogies adds a nice mix of different designs and abilities, and if environments end up as varied as the vehicles seem to be, this could be one of the best Star Wars multiplayer experiences in years.

Disclosure: The author of this article worked closely with Mitch Dyer, now a writer at EA Motive working on this game’s single-player campaign, from 2012-2016 in his capacity as an editor at IGN.

Andrew is IGN’s executive editor of news and really wishes he could play as an Ewok pilot. You can find him rambling about Persona and cute animals on Twitter.

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