The Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection is Aspyr’s latest attempt at bringing a classic video game experience into the modern age. This time around, the studio is taking us back 20 years, to 2004. It was an era of Christian Bale starving himself for The Machinist, Green Day calling out the American Idiots in charge of running the US, and Pandemic delivering a Star Wars gaming experience that was lightyears ahead of its time. The good old days before the Disney/EA chokehold on all things Star Wars.
How you feel about the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection will likely depend on what you are hoping for from the experience. If you are looking for something that looks like it was released last week that simultaneously manages to capture that sweet noughties nostalgia, then you may be left disappointed. This leans more towards being a basic port than a proper remaster, but for the price it does provide a fun retro experience in terms of its single player modes.
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection is out now and is available on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC.
Upon booting up the game, players are greeted with the classic John Williams theme, paired with a menu screen that has been slightly updated to accommodate modern audiences. However, it is still very dated in terms of its sound effects, layout and color scheme. It strikes a decent balance of being both distinctly of the era and incorporating the online gaming options of 2024.
Once loading up the campaign, the glorious FMV cutscenes play out in order to introduce each mission, showing clips from Episodes I-VI. Then you are given the option of spawning at a handful of locations across various maps, just like in the original game. Once you spawn in though, is when you will notice a distinct difference.
Rather than feeling ultra clunky and tanky, the controls in the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection feel remarkably responsive and fairly intuitive. With just a small bit of minor tweaking, you can get this two-decade-old title feeling pretty damn smooth to play. Just like the old days, aiming is as straightforward as pointing the crosshair at what you want dead and pulling the trigger, only now it is a lot easier to move that crosshair over the screen towards your target. Vehicles and turrets are also fun and intuitive to control.
The upscaling to 60fps also helps things to feel smoother than ever, even if the overall game looks relatively the same at first glance. Certain textures have been slightly upgraded, which is noticeable if you know what to look for, but there is no denying that this is still very much a title from 2004 ported over to current-gen systems. You are never going to fool anyone into thinking that Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection is a recent release; even if installing the game does take up a significant 63GB of space on your machine.
It is going to be up to the individual whether or not you accept this lack of visual quality in a 2024 release. It does feel particularly lazy when you compare it to Aspyr’s other recent effort of Tomb Raider I-III Remastered, which featured new character models that show off the new upgraded textures phenomenally. The Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection is a much worse looking game by comparison.
If I was to have published this review yesterday, this would have been where my review would have wrapped up. I would have written the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection off as a somewhat lazy port that is mostly harmless and contains some nostalgic fun. However, I chose to hold off one more day for the servers to go live so that I could test out the game’s online mode.
Oh, boy…
This is the worst online mode I have experienced in a while
The online modes in Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection are an utter mess. This is largely due thanks to the fact that, – during my initial play session, – there were only three servers assigned to handle this game’s entire online player base. Last night, on the game’s official launch day, there were 10,000 players online and searching for a game. The three servers allowed for 64 players each, meaning that the total number of slots available was a meagre 192.
This obviously led to a great deal of waiting around, with pot luck being our only chance of getting a game. Why it was decided that three servers would be enough to handle the demand for this title at launch is a decision that I will never understand. Amazingly, I did eventually manage to get into a game and when I did, I was less than impressed with what I found.
There haven’t been any quality of life improvements made to the game whatsoever. I realized this when my friend and I spent over 30 minutes trying to work out how to party up within the game’s menus, before realizing that this function was simply not included, despite this being a game designed to play with your friends online.
The only way to get into a game with a friend, is to join a match yourself, and then invite your friend. Even this didn’t work at first, with my friend not receiving the invite that I sent until around the fifth try. This sort of cobbled together functionality was acceptable in 2004, but it is utterly inexcusable in 2024.
We’ve not got company
While more servers are seemingly continuously being added to alleviate the excruciatingly long wait times for a game, the fact that only three servers were available on launch night actually had its benefits.
As the option to invite a friend into my party wasn’t working consistently, the fact that there were less than 200 online slots available initially meant that if the two of you just continually searched for a game, you would have a pretty good chance of ending up in the same match. It is not an elegant solution, and often it would put you on opposing sides of the conflict rather than in the same squad, but at least it meant I was able to play with my friend.
However, that opened up a whole litany of other issues, with the main one being constant rubberbanding. Both my friend and I experienced this issue with egregious frequency, and we also saw it occur several times for other players too. Battlefront 2 was definitely worse for technical issues than the first Battlefront was, but neither were perfect.
A few more servers did seem to kick in after this initial match, as it became gradually easier to find a game as the night went on. This slightly alleviated our frustration of randomly being disconnected more than once. Hopefully the lack of servers is an issue that will be resolved over time with more being added incrementally, but the fact that things were in such a state at launch is disgraceful.
In summary, the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection would have been a game that I would have recommended for the asking price based on what I played before the game’s launch date, on the assumption that the online mode was functioning properly. As long as you don’t mind the distinctly retro look of the port. However, the infuriating experience that I had with the game’s online mode on launch night is enough to knock a good few points off of my overall score. Hopefully these issues can be amended by Aspyr over time, but as things stand the now, calling it a mess would be an understatement.
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection – 4/10
