You could feel a disturbance in the Force when Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection was announced recently, as a generation of fans who poured hours of their adolescences into the original Battlefront games cried out in joy. That classic duo, developed by Pandemic Studios, was a staple of the early generation of mainstream online gaming on PlayStation 2 and Xbox, still remembered fondly in many fan circles.
With Aspyr and a handful of other smaller studios gradually churning through the library of classic Star Wars games and pumping out remasters for modern consoles, the Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection concept makes perfect sense, right? Take a multiplayer classic and plug it into the modern ecosystem of online gaming, then sit back and watch the cash roll in.
Unfortunately, if the last few arrivals in this long march of remasters hadn’t already shown it, the Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection proves that sometimes classics are better left in the past if you’re just going to update them with a tactless coat of paint.
As it is, Star Wars Battlefront and Battlefront II were already multiplayer-heavy experiences. Both have single-player campaigns that are little more than a series of battles like those you’d find in the online mode, just with AI opponents and teammates. Whether that’s a step up or a step down from the online experience is open to interpretation, depending on the lobbies you get into. Regardless, it was always a flat experience to hold players over when they couldn’t do multiplayer, and it hasn’t improved with age—each a fairly mindless affair costing about 8 hours.
The bad press of Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection‘s initial connection issues on some platforms is regrettable and not entirely the fault of the software itself, but it does highlight just how shallow the core experience is.
The crux of the Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection is its online modes, which are more promising… in theory, at least. Each game has a variety of class presets for each faction, some great open maps, and different types of objectives at play; Battlefront II is especially strong in its offerings, adding space combat into the mix.
That being said, the online experience as of the collection’s launch has not been stellar. As soon as the game launched on Friday, Aspyr quickly released an apology for “critical errors with our network infrastructure [resulting in] incredibly high ping, matchmaking errors, crashes, and servers not appearing in the browser.“
This was not my experience playing Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection on the Nintendo Switch on launch day; I could find some matches in Battlefront right away and even play through them entirely. Checking in at various times over the launch weekend, I could get into some form of the game without waiting. However, once I was in, the quality of those matches irked me.
Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection hasn’t really ironed out the kinks with AI. So, when you get into a match with a small handful of actual players and the rest of the match is populated with bots, it’s not exactly a stimulating experience—watching the bots on either side move erratically, make horrible strategic decisions, or Zerg Rush player characters like they have a deeply personal vendetta.
One match I played was essentially me versus another player, and it boiled down to who could murder more brainless bots and get control of their hero character the most. Others were absolute blow-outs, with a mismatched team steamrolling the objectives and winning in record time; I was on both sides of this outcome, and either way, it gets old incredibly fast.
Star Wars Battlefront II has the added advantage of Space Combat, where you can hop into various starfighters and engage in the classic pastime of dogfighting and crippling enemy freighters, component by component. Boarding an enemy ship was some of the most fun I had in Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection, but even that was marred by the tediousness of respawning on my own ship, flying back, boarding again, and making incremental progress on destroying the internal objective before a wave of bots swarmed.
Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection proves that sometimes classics are better left in the past, if you’re just going to update them with a tactless coat of paint.
The bad press of the game’s initial connection issues on some platforms is regrettable and not entirely the fault of the software itself. However, it highlights just how shallow the core experience is now that it’s driven away vast swatches of the target audience. Visually, the remaster is just fine, and I got a kick out of re-living the classic media tie-in experience of seeing movie footage juxtaposed against in-engine cutscenes. But when you strip it down to the roots, Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection feels like an abandoned museum.
Now, of course, nostalgia is a powerful thing. Plenty of people will knowingly and happily snap up Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection to relive those halcyon teenaged years with buddies for just a little while. For this purpose, the remasters are janky yet sufficient. (And I won’t judge because if my beloved X-Wing and TIE Fighter games from the Windows 95 era were to get the same treatment, I’d probably be doing the same thing.)
What is a shame is that those people will be fleeced in the process unless they happen to grab this collection on sale. Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection merited a $20 USD price tag at best, or $10 per game, but $34.99 USD is indefensible. Best case scenario, they should have been appended to the recent Star Wars Heritage Pack, which came out for Switch earlier this year, bundled alongside 7 other unremarkable ports.
It’s also a shame that this process keeps repeating. Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection is just the latest in a long line of minimal-effort, overpriced remasters that only serve to make forgotten gems functionally accessible on modern hardware. Aspyr has been coasting on these games’ legacies ever since they put out Knights of the Old Republic on Switch in 2021, and one has to wonder which will give out first: the back catalogue of games to treat this way or the fans’ patience.
Perhaps this puts the whole matter in the starkest terms: Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection made me certain that the general public had been too hard on the more recent Battlefront games made by EA Dice. At least Battlefront 2 (2017) had a solid, self-sufficient campaign mode and fixed its problems over time, rather than reprinting flawed, dated classics with their warts hidden under a thin veneer.
