Star Wars: Battlefront II – Starfighter Assault Gameplay

Star Wars: Battlefront II is one of the most anticipated games being released this fall.  The second installment of the rebooted franchise finally brings us a single-player campaign as well as a revamped multiplayer experience.  EA provided a sneak peak at their Gamescom presentation this week and it looks fabulous.  We got to see several minutes of space battling, and learned several new details along the way.  Check out the gameplay trailer below:

My brother would disagree with this, but my favorite part of the current Battlefront game is the space battles.  Getting the chance to pilot Tie Interceptors and X-Wings in all out never-ending battles requires you to have laser sharp reflexes.  The non-stop action coupled with the raised hairs on your arm whenever you find that magical power-up that lets you pilot the Millennium Falcon were awesomely satisfying.  Battlefront II improves on the previous game by adding a third standard ship to pilot on each side plus two hero ships.  The standard rebel ships now include a Bomber class Y-Wing in addition to the A-Wing and X-Wing.  As for the Imperial scum side, you get to pilot a Tie Bomber in addition to the Tie Fighter and Tie Interceptor.

EA has also made a change to how hero ships are obtained, and it looks much more exciting.  The hero ships are available from your ship selection once you obtain a certain amount of battle points.  Once this reached, you get two choices of hero ships on each side.  On the dark side, you can choose Slave I, which is now complete with those awesome sounding seismic charges, or Darth Maul’s Scimitar, which can cloak!  On the rebel side, you get the Millennium Falcon with Han and Chewie as your pilots or Poe Dameron’s custom black X-Wing.  In addition to a wider selection of ships, each ship, including the hero ships, can now be upgraded with star cards.  The controls for all ships have been rebuilt from the ground up to give each ship a unique feel.

As for the levels, an assault on a Star Destroyer was featured that consists of three phases.  The first has you destroying the enemy defenses, which consists of taking out turrets and the light-class enemy ships.  Once these have been defeated, its on to phase two where you have to destroy shield generators that are located inside one of the ships.  You are weaving in and out of the inner parts of imperial ships to destroy them while fighting off enemy fighters that are relentlessly coming after you.  After the shield generators are destroyed, phase three consists of destroying power couplings to make the Star Destroyer’s reactor vulnerable.  Once they are disabled, you’re free to target the reactor, but you only have a limited amount of time to do it before you have to destroy the power couplings again.  The destruction of the reactor causes the Star Destroyer to explode and the mission is over.  You can see the action for yourself in the nine minutes of gameplay below, courtesy of IGN:

I cannot wait to get my hands Battlefront II.  I know EA is a dirty word in a lot of circles, but they seem to have put a lot of effort into improving the experience from the last game.  We will be testing the beta as soon as it is released and will let you know what we think about it. Be sure to pre-order your copy of Star Wars: Battlefront II before it is released on November 17th so you can get the playable characters from The Last Jedi!

Tell us your thoughts of the new features in the comments below!