Star Wars - Battlefront

There are no Jedi to play as. That absence is the whole design argument here: a saga built around chosen ones handed over to the anonymous grunt who gets shot off a speeder bike outside a command post nobody will remember. Pandemic Studios understood that the trenches of Hoth and the clone lines on Geonosis were the interesting part of the films' battle scenes, and built a shooter around holding ground rather than saving the galaxy.

The loop is capture-and-hold. Each map is a set of command posts; taking one flips it to your side and gives your team a spawn point, while reinforcement counts tick down with every death. Lose your last post and you lose, which turns even a comfortable lead into a scramble when a single enemy sneaks behind the lines. The four factions each field a handful of classes, and the difference between a rifleman and a rocket trooper is coarse but readable. It is not a deep kit. It does not need to be, because most of the tension comes from where you are standing and how many bodies your side has left.

Vehicles are the showpiece. Snowspeeders with tow cables, AT-STs that can be swarmed on foot, X-wings that turn a ground fight into something else entirely. On PS2 the frame rate pays for this, and the flight handling is loose enough that dogfighting is mostly a matter of pointing and hoping. The AI, meanwhile, is the game's most visible age: bots wander, clump in doorways, and occasionally hand you a command post for free. Playing alone against them in Galactic Conquest reveals the seams fast.

With two players on a couch or a full room online, the seams stop mattering. Star Wars Battlefront arrived in 2004 when the console shooter was still working out how to stage large battles without a PC's headroom, and it solved the problem by keeping the objectives simple and letting the scenery do the identifying work. The sound design carries a lot of that weight — blaster fire, AT-AT footfalls, the specific whine of a TIE pass overhead.

What holds up is the modesty of it. This is a straightforward territory shooter wearing the most recognisable costume in science fiction, and it never pretends to be more. The sequel would add heroes, space battles and a better campaign, which is why this one gets skipped. But there is something clean about a Star Wars game where dying is routine and the map is the only thing that remembers you were there.