Pandemic then launches Star Wars: The Clone Wars in 2002, which is a vehicle-based licensed tie-in that puts players right in the heart of the action. That and, uh, the baseball game Triple Play 2002. The first few releases by its developer, Pandemic Studios, features prominent real-time strategy elements near the twilight of the genre’s heyday in the early 2000s. It’s important to recognize the context surrounding the development of Star Wars: Battlefront 2. How to compete (when you don’t have the time) Star Wars: Battlefront 2, flawed though it may be, gave its players a taste of the future as resilient as the game itself, and it’s all thanks to the Galactic Conquest mode. But I am taking off my own rose-tinted glasses and finding something far more interesting than an undisputed classic. Unlike other games I’ve written about for Polygon, I’m not discovering an underrated game from the past. Battlefront 2 seems to keep finding ways to reach new audiences, whether that’s the backwards compatibility of Xbox One, or GOG updating the PC version with online server support. A recent Games with Gold promotion brought the game into the digital libraries of every Xbox Live subscriber. I’m not the only one playing the original Star Wars: Battlefront 2 in 2019. “Heroes” are slippery creatures with underwhelming abilities whose sense of power was projected by my young mind’s amazement at being Luke Skywalker.

Previously thrilling space battles are rote exercises in destroying the same weak points against the same backgrounds, time and time again. What I remember as chaotic scenes of blaster fire are now revealed to be smooth landscapes filled with simplistic AI. Star Wars: Battlefront 2 didn’t age as well as I had thought it did.

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