Star Wars Battlefront

I got a few good hours of playing time in on this game the other night, and my verdict is a solid "Meh." It's not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, it just left me wanting something a little more. I actually saw TV commercials for this game (which is rare for a PC-based game, although this one is available for PS2 and XBox as well) and was expecting something more than just Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield Vietnam rehashed in the Star Wars universe. It's more "capture and defend the points on the map" fun, which I enjoy, but I've been playing this sort of game for over two years now, and I haven't found any innovative features that this game has added. The graphics are well done, and it's neat that it covers battles from both the original trilogy as well as the newer "saga" films, but I've found multiplay to be inexcusably laggy (my 768K DSL has no trouble with either of the Battlefield games from EA) and there are a couple features from the Battlefield series that are missing: you can't capture a point by parking a vehicle on the flag, the flags don't seem to turn any faster by having additional soldiers sit on the capture points, and you can't pick up new weapon "kits" from fallen soldiers, friend or foe. But the new maps and vehicles are neat, the battles are certainly grand in scale (although even in online play, a good number of the combatants are AI-controlled), and unlike in EA's masterpieces, the AI soldiers are slightly smarter than the average head of cabbage. My verdict on this one: thumbs squarely in the middle. This should keep me occupied until Tribes Vengeance comes out later this fall, at any rate. Some of my online pals over at the August Knights have bought it as well, so we should be able to get some quality multiplayer fun out of it.