Feel the Force

Star Wars is more than just three good films and three bad ones.

It’s more than locking S-Foils in attack positions, more than that soaring, thunderous John Williams score and even more than the foresight to retain the merchandising rights.

Star Wars is a feeling.

When you think about Star Wars you probably feel something before you can even articulate it, a seed deep inside that was planted there when you were young and first saw it, and delighted at the lasers and strange space knights.

It’s the feeling that the prequels never managed to get, that was missing from the otherwise excellent Knights of the Old Republic and the countless novels and comics now swept away by the great tide of new opportunities brought in by Disney and their cavernous pockets.

This is a longing for ‘our’ Star Wars, for practical effects and a return to the romanticism of those old space serials from which so much of the fantasy and adventure was cribbed. We want more of the same but also different, a tall order that we now look to J.J Abrams to fulfill with baited breath.

In preparation I have been ravenously devouring every scrap of Star Wars I can lay my hands on. The TV spots, the trailers and of course, the games.

Star Wars Battlefront has long been a series which I enjoyed but felt like it had issues. It was a split screen favourite on the PS2 owing to the fact that it had bots in an era where trying to hook your console up to the internet required you to attend Hogwarts and take a masters degree in Technomancy.

It was a fine game but never a game that felt particularly ‘Star Warsy’ if you’ll pardon the term. All the components were things you knew from Star Wars; Jedi, Storm Troopers, X-Wings and TIE Fighters were all there, but they could have been generic men and ships and I’d probably have had as much fun. It felt like a mass combat game that was wearing a Star Wars skin, rather than one that has Star Wars baked deep into its DNA.

It’s the problem I’ve been having with the Star Wars Imperial Assault game. For those of you not tapping the hot, throbbing vein of board gaming Imperial Assault is a game in which you take the role of warriors of the Rebel alliance facing down an opposing player who commands the dread forces of the Galactic Empire and just generally acts like a tool.

The idea is you progress through a campaign of missions, foiling the empire and preventing them from wiping out the Rebel Alliance. Along the way you are hunted by Stormtroopers, Imperial Guards, AT-STs and even Darth Vader himself.

Again, on paper everything about this seems awesome. It has all the right components, the characters you play fit neatly into the archetypes established by the movies, the enemies are all ones you’ve seen on screen and you can see yourself backed up in the Death Star, pinned down by Stormtroopers as you try to make good your escape.

Again, this is about a moment in the movies and that crystallized feeling that is dug out of the soil of your mind and polished off.

The problem is that expectation and reality seldom intersect. Imperial Assault is, beneath the hood, just Descent, a game of dungeon crawling renowned for its tendency to landslide in one direction or the other. Either the characters are unstoppable heroes of legend or the ‘monster’ player ends up commanding an army of what can be charitably called ‘tough bastards’.

Slamming our heads against a particularly potent Imperial commander was challenging, but not game breaking. What began to unravel the experience for me was the missions themselves.

I expected heroism, what I got were missions that had no margin of error, often timed or else with the Imperial player receiving such gross reinforcements that victory was impossible without actual Jedi prescience.

Often games were ending not because one side or other had made a courageous or bold tactical maneuver but because the scenario favoured one side or the other to a degree that it required exceptional tactics to even compete.

As a tactical miniatures game it is entirely competent, but it’s a tough kernel in a Star Wars bag, the kind you don’t realise until you bite down and it just feels wrong.

What’s wrong is a lack of levity, Star Wars has never been about being tough to crack or difficult to master. Star Wars games should be ones you can play with your kids or your friends who don’t have the same masters in “Advance Miniature Tactics” that you do.

That’s maybe why I like the new Star Wars Battlefront so much. The world has moved on in 10 years and when many of us heard DICE had stepped in to handle the mantle we rightly feared that it would become Battlefield with a Star Wars skin. It would have been easy and, in all honesty, probably would have been enough.

They didn’t though, and thank the maker for that!

What Star Wars Battlefront really captures is exactly what they’ve marketed it on; the feeling of playing.

It’s exactly how you saw Star Wars battles in your mind as a kid. Lasers and explosions and fighters in the sky. The little plastic toys have been replaced with some of the prettiest visuals of any game I have ever played, but it’s more than that.

Anyone can make a game pretty, but poly counts and 60fps isn’t what counts. It’s aesthetics. Battlefront doesn’t capture the aesthetics of the Star Wars universe, it focuses on reproducing the style and feeling of the movies, and this is a masterstroke.

I run forward, I fire my blaster and sparks erupt, perhaps with a little more gusto than they did in the 70’s, but when I see the Stormtrooper wheeling over like a stunt double it feels like I’m watching the films, and more than that, this film is about me.

It’s perhaps a little thing, but it sets up a mind space for you and then the game never breaks that down. Every weapon, every fighter and every power up, right up to taking control of Darth Vader, feels exactly as you expect and never breaks that cinematic feeling.

It is a game that is Star Wars first and Battlefront second and that is exactly what I want.

Where Battlefront succeeds and Imperial Assault fails is how they keep me engaged. Battlefront has a levity to it that Imperial Assault doesn’t, that it can’t by its very design. You see in any competitive game how you handle defeat is as important as how you reward success.

Battlefront has a short cycle time, I live, I die, I live again. I always progress even if we lose the match and so I always feel rewarded even if I don’t win. My enemies grow too with every game they play, and many will have played more than me, but they are rewarded with options as opposed to strength.

In comparison Imperial Assault brutally punishes mistakes, often compounded by it witholding information from the Rebel side who can least afford to make them. Making the wrong decision early can easily cost you the game though you might not realise how impossible the task is until turns later when the Imperial Player unveils their diabolical scheme.

Your reward for defeat, you stand still whilst your opponent grows more powerful. Defeat is a wasted session from which you will scrape a few creds and hope whatever you’ve saved can afford you some counter to whatever your opponent has planned for next time.

Either can engage me but to keep me returning I need to feel like my input makes a difference. A game of Imperial Assault is taxing, I can’t just allow the sound of lasers and stomping walkers wash over me, I’m constantly present and when the battle turns and there’s nothing I can do I feel more than helpless, I feel at the mercy of the system rather than our opponent.

So what do I really want from a Star Wars game? Make me feel like the movies did, give me adventure, give me excitement and even challenge me, but ultimately I need to feel like the boy fixing moisture vaporators and drinking blue milk. I need to feel like I can take on the universe, and win.

I need to feel The Force Awaken.