I was so excited when Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection was announced. Wrapping up the two iconic Battlefront games from the early 2000s is like wrapping up my childhood. I put countless hours into these games and always look for an excuse to replay them. Launch day came and went without me because I was busy doing something else, and to my horror when I finally sat down and checked out the online reaction, the Classic Collection was getting decimated. How did Aspyr fail so badly at what seemed like easy money? And are the original Battlefront games still worth playing in 2024?
To figure those things out I’m going to break this review up into two acts: the first is going to focus on the quality of the re-release that Aspyr has given us, and the second will be about the games themselves. So hold on to your butts, because this is where the fun begins.
Remaster? Remake? Re-release?
The first thing we need to do is determine exactly who the Classic Collection is for. On PC, the original versions of both games are readily available on Steam for less than this new package and have fully functional multiplayer and a wealth of excellent mods, including some that add a new lick of paint. So I’ll spoil my review here by saying that if you already own the originals on PC, go ahead and skip the Classic Collection, at least for now. The improvements simply aren’t good enough to justify the price.
Console players, however, have been more limited. On the Xbox, both titles are playable via backwards compatibility. On PlayStation and Switch, neither Battlefront nor Battlefront 2 can be played natively. That makes this Classic Collection the best option for experiencing these two fantastic games on modern hardware, but that’s also frustrating given how low-quality this port is. Maybe it’s because I spent hundreds of hours in these games as a kid, but they deserved much better than this low-effort attempt from Aspyr.
Available On: PC, Xbox Series S/X, Xbox One, PlayStation, Switch
Reviewed On: PS5Developed by: Aspyr
Published by: Aspyr
Review code provided by the publisher.
Oddly, Aspyr hasn’t really advertised the graphical enhancements in the Classic Collection which is baffling to me considering how little else it has going for it. While it is not a massive leap up in visual quality, there are a few improvements that make the Classic Collection the best-looking version of both games. Unless you count some of the sick fan-made mods for the PC editions, of course, and you really should because sweet Jesus there are some talented people out there.
The textures in both of these updated versions seem to have been taken from the original PC releases of Battlefront and Battlefront 2, which already looked significantly better than their console counterparts and then upscaled to 4K. There has been some debate about whether the textures were upscaled using AI, but nothing has actually been proven and Aspyr hasn’t said anything about it. Considering modern graphics cards already using AI upscaling, and the upcoming PS5 Pro will have its own machine learning upscaling, I’m not too bothered if this is true or not. That said, a basic AI renovation doesn’t warrant the RRP. Whether it’s by the hands of a human or the power of an AI, the result is a nice uptick in detail, though obviously nowhere near what a proper remaster could have done. The PC version also had a few reflective surfaces which have now been extended to vehicles and other areas like the floor in Coruscant.
