Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron review

Star Wars! Truly it’s the game license that keeps on giving, providing a universe that, even now, is capable of providing fresh stories and experiences. Elite Squadron further stripmines the Clone Wars era to tell the tale of two clone brothers, X1 and X2, one of whom (somewhat predictably) falls to the dark side...

You play X2, a clone of some repute who’s engineered from the DNA of a Jedi Master, and the game’s single-player mode takes you through many major events of the Star Wars saga. The big selling point of Elite Squadron, of course, is that it’s the first Battlefront game that gives you full freedom to fight wherever you want, making transitions from infantry to vehicles as you wish – so during a mission you may start out on foot on a planet surface, battling enemy droids, then hop into a starfighter, take to the air, and even into space to dogfight with other spaceships. It’s heady, ambitious stuff, especially in the game’s online modes, which is where the real appeal of the Battlefront games lies.

Unfortunately, everything’s soured a little bit by slightly wonky controls (we lost count of the times we oversteered a spaceship and crashed), a sometimes erratic lock-on aim and a camera that swings unhelpfully around in close quarters. While Elite Squadron is undoubtedly the best PSP Battlefront yet, loving it unreservedly relies more on your love of Star Wars than its sometimes frustrating mechanics. Nevertheless, this is still epic, cracking Star Wars battling.

Nov 3, 2009