Having grown up with Star Wars since my early childhood, and having spent loads of time playing with friends or my kids, dreaming of that universe, the Battlefront games were exciting when they were introduced. There had been some other games like Rogue Squadron that had brought some aspects to experiencing moments from the movies, but there hadn’t been anything with quite the scope and breadth that they ultimately offered. When they were originally released, and you could truly play with a server full of other equally-excited Star Wars nerds, there was a giddy sense of magic to them. Now, quite a number of years later, unfortunately things aren’t quite as positive with this overhauled collection.

For those unfamiliar, both of the original Battlefront titles were set up to drop you into a variety of conflicts from all over the board. Different environments, combatants on either side, objectives, and equipment set  the stage for variety, while always keeping some of the same core unit types on each side to help with consistency. Ideally played online with up to 64 people, the scale of the battles could be exhilarating once you got the hang of how to play, but it could also be chaotic and overwhelming at first. Not only did you have multiple classes to understand, you could also have a variety of vehicles to utilize (including ships for space battles), and then just to make things crazier, heroes could periodically spawn and shake things up even more. Trying to get a handle of everything is where the single-player campaigns came into play, walking you through a progression of scenarios and battles, and leaning on you to really push things forward to win with the support of AI bots on either side. But once you were up to speed, on a server, and everything was clicking with 2 well-matched sides duking it out, it made for a highly-engaging spectacle to be sure.

Now, the potential for that sort of conflict still exists. But based both on the current online play situation, and certainly the abundance of other distractions, the interest in this pack will likely be fleeting at best. Yes, you’ll still be able to play the single-player campaigns if you’d like, and there will likely be sporadic numbers of people playing online, but in order to fill in the blanks you’ll likely be paired with quite a lot of bots and they’re really not up to the challenge of making skirmishes exciting. Operating somewhere between merely inept and sometimes staggeringly stupid, the bots that may initially seem reasonable enough really don’t hold up well once you’ve played a bit against other people. Granted, you can’t always rely on humans to play in a constructive or team-oriented manner, but by comparison the bots are too often aimless and that can make trying to play for the bigger stakes of any given map quite painful. The secret sauce for the game is really playing with as many other people as possible, and once you lose that the experience can sour quite quickly, sad to say.

All of this makes the Battlefront Classic Collection a bit of a tough call. If you’re either nostalgic to return to the gameplay, or are simply intrigued by the opportunity to more directly experience Star Wars, it can still be fun for a while. In particular, the odd opportunity to play as a Jedi and rip through enemies with your lightsaber, or gear up in a lumbering vehicle, blowing away anything that moves with your overpowered laser cannons, can be quite a rush. But without being tested and challenged that thrill can only last for so long, so as a long-term investment the fun here seems very much at risk the further out from launch that you project. Perhaps returning just periodically it could remain fun a little longer, but without great numbers playing this every night, it just doesn’t look to have very good legs for longevity.