Star Wars: Battlefront II frustrates me in ways I never knew I could be frustrated. It is both a lovingly crafted companion to the films and a tangled mess of corporate meddling. There is a strong heart at the center but finding it means peeling back layers of unnecessary and infuriating nonsense.
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I want to like Star Wars Battlefront II. It improves upon what came before. While the single player barely tells a coherent story, the action manages to delight and where the multiplayer takes acclimation it eventually delivers further excitement. But it’s also a testament to some of the most insidious and predatory design decisions of recent years, crushing the excitement under a mountain of poor decisions. Battlefront II had the easiest job in the world: deliver a multiplayer Star Wars game that captures the films’ operatic battles and improve upon a hyped predecessor that under-delivered. Unfortunately, the game delivered at launch—perpetually couched with the fact that EA could change its economy and patch its systems and fix so many of these problems—manages to fuck that up.