Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection released on March 13th, 2024 is a bundled release being marketed as the “definitive collection”, nothing could be further from the truth. The classic collection comes courtesy of Aspyr, an American studio that has over 200 games that they have ported into new platforms. Aspyr is the developer and Publisher of the Battlefront: Classic collection. They have had success with other ports such as the new Tomb Raider I-II-III Remaster so the questions everyone is asking is, what happened? I was excited. Key word here is WAS. I love Battlefront, second only to the Rogue Squadron games from the Nintendo 64 and GameCube era.
Let’s dive right into what the game looks like. It is, without a doubt, a graphical improvement over what it used to be and that is a major win. The maps have been overhauled to be much sharper; colors have been given more vibrancy where it needed. The lighting has improved so that areas are easier to see and even small little details like buttons on consoles, which you never use, look pretty good. Mustafar in particular in my opinion has been one of the most improved with the lava and magma now looking more fluid and not just red and black blobs. It looks better, I can’t deny that everything looks sharper, brighter, more color depth. There is a win here.
The rest is where the ball is being dropped, starting with audio. Let’s begin with the fact that the iconic sound used when loading into a map as it targeted an area and got closer with every lock in sounds like garbage compared to the original. It’s been slowed down and compressed to be a sad imitation of what it used to be. How do you mess up a sound that is already in the game? Okay, I got that out of the way. The rest of the Battlefront Classic Collection suffers from having the audio being set at very low levels, even when increased in the audio settings. There also seems to be a slew of sounds that are either distorted originals or simply just not working. These sorts of issues are the prime example that could NOT have been missed during a playthrough when they were testing it which begs the question, did they bother to do a quality control test prior to releasing it? Was it just “good enough” that they didn’t see a need to? It sure sounds like it to the rest of us.
How about gameplay? For the most part, both Battlefront 1 and Battlefront 2 play pretty well in this collection. You can do the campaigns and enjoy how much better they look while playing through them. I’m partial to the Galactic Conquest mode as I rather enjoy the space battles that much more, and I like just getting into the thick of it. The heroic assault mode had some bonus characters released and is now playable with new characters that were not available to everyone as they were Xbox live exclusives with both Kit Fisto and Asaajj Ventress having unique animations and move sets. Single player is fine, but what is Battlefront about?
Multiplayer; that’s what shines in Battlefront games. That’s why we have been wanting a remaster of the originals. Did we get it? No. Kinda. Sorta? There is multiplayer support for the Battlefront: Classic collection, if you can join it at all or if you don’t get immediately kicked when you do. Releasing with a whopping THREE servers available at launch with a capacity of 64 players each for a total of 192 slots. Steam has its peak at over 9500 players. That means 9300 of those players could not play multiplayer. What exactly is the point of launching such a popular multiplayer game and then skimping on the servers? The single player isn’t what we came here for! When those 192 players did manage to connect most were kicked from the servers due to instability. Is it fixable? Sure, they can increase servers, and they did post launch. Is it too late? Probably.
At the end of the day, the message that I am trying to relay is don’t buy this game. You can buy the old original unbundled releases for cheaper than this and everything works. Sure, you may lose out on one or two maps but at least those servers are working, you aren’t getting disconnected every few minutes and the game isn’t trying to throw you into the stratosphere every time you die or blow out your eardrums. If you really want to shell out the money for this classic collection it’ll set you back $35 on PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo stores.
