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The first thing that strikes home, as both Stormtroopers and Rebels dart every which-way across Sullust's wasteland, is just how well it all comes together visually. Not only in seeing the latest PC build running this unseen map at tip-top settings, bringing to life a charcoal-black network of rock pathways and ruined spacecraft. But it's also in the style - how DICE works finer touches into its Star Wars shooter to separate the game from its Battlefield legacy.Having gone hands-on with three maps at a recent Stockholm event, Battlefront's audio-visual design is an obvious triumph. A lot of time has clearly been spent poring over Lucasfilm's original materials to match every setting, and in the latest map, Sullust - alongside Tatooine's deserts and the snowy Hoth - it becomes three for three. The level design, vehicles and everything in between strike a nostalgic note as they're paraded across each area's opening cinematic (bite-sized tasters of a solo adventure that could have been). In terms of scene setting, between the iconic, high-pitched squeal of a blaster ricochet, to the vintage 'screen-wipe' camera effect that kicks in with each respawn, it's all there.
It's an authentic front, but it's also fair to say its mechanics aren't adapted to quite the same degree. Even in smaller, 16 player battles on this map, capturing escape pods leads us to a familiar rotation of play; run, shoot, die, and respawn. Even divorced from vehicles on this smaller map, a certain debt is owed to Battlefield's overall rhythm. John Williams' classic motif keeps us anchored to a world occupied by Luke, Leia and Han, but the ebb and flow of its shoot-outs is unmistakable in origin. It's a DICE sandbox shooter based on Star Wars' fiction, but on that premise, it perhaps doesn't need a radical overhaul to work.
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