Unless it's layered with all the
Fallouty things that make
Fallout Fallout, an FPS is take-it-or-leave-it for me, relegated to couch gaming and the occasional whim. Big online multiplayer FPS games are even farther outside my interest radius; I tried the multiplayer for
Modern Warfare 2 once or twice and was summarily unimpressed and annoyed.
This past Christmas I was presented with the opportunity to be given a 'Playing Station, Mk.IV' with the
Warring Stars: Battling Front game included, and I took it—admittedly because I had just seen
Star Wars: The Force Awakens for the third time in theaters.
What I found was the sweet spot, that deeper-shaded intersection of the Venn diagram between FPS, MMO, and SIGASA (Shit I Give A Shit About).
The biggest turnoff for me when playing online against strangers is the tendency for said strangers to be incurably fuckwadish. Corpse-humping, spawn-camping, screaming homophobic and/or racist things into the microphone for the whole world to hear; you're on a gaming site; you are basically aware of this culture. What
Front o' the Battle provides is
absolutely no opportunity for any of that whatsoever. Admiral
Ackbar, is that ever a relief. You can't communicate text or voice with anyone who's not in a party that you and your friends selectively assemble, so people
can't be dicks, but that's not all. People straight-up don't have time to fuck around with being dicks. And that's the beauty: the game scenarios are set up just so all you can or want to focus on is accomplishing your team's goals.
When are you going to have time to call some unknown individual a
«censored»ing
«censored» with a
«censored» up their
«censored» if you're sprinting from your random spawn point back to the control point to wrest it from the grubby mitts of the Rebel scum? How exactly are you going to carve out the time to hump the dead face of the buckethead you just blasted when another twenty bucketheads are right behind him with a giant AT-AT bringing up the rear?
You're here to shoot blasters. And you're going to shoot blasters.
The scenarios are all well-designed, and fun in their own ways. I like 'Supremacy' for intensity, 'Blast' for
007y stripped-down smaller battles, and 'Fighter Squadron' for that childlike glee that I didn't know I was still capable of feeling. But there's much to be said about the other games, like the CTFishness of 'Droid Run' and 'Cargo' and the fan-boner-inducing games like 'Hero Hunt.'
Speaking of the heroes, I oftentimes avoid picking up the hero tokens when I see them. There's a bit of a learning curve to being an asset to your team as a Jedi (Luke or Vader), badass (Solo or Fett), or support (Leia or Emperor), and it takes an amount of practice I have not yet invested myself in. Whenever I have picked up that token, I last a terribly short amount of time as the entire enemy team rains hot fire down on me. Once I was Boba Fett and put some work in, but that was it.
And speaking of getting dunked on, prepare for a lot of that. An ex-girlfriend picked up juggling once, and the first thing the book said to do was hold the ball in your hand, then just drop it on the floor. 'You'll be doing this a lot,' the book said. 'Better get used to that.' If you don't like spawning, running for five seconds, and then getting your face liquified by someone you never saw, maybe don't pick up
The Star Wars with the Battles in Front. You'll have much better runs, yeah. But you will have several—
several—games where you feel like you just can't do jack shit without your genitals getting immediately zapped off.
Yet it's still fun. Why, you ask? (You asked, right?) Answer: it's
Star Wars.
You are handed a blaster, and you are told to shoot the stormtroopers who are invading the Rebel base on Hoth. You are hopping into a TIE fighter and shooting down Rebel scum over the desert of Jakku. You become Luke Skywalker and you hurl yourself at a whole pack of stormtroopers who are all dropping poodoos in their white plastic underwear.
It may not be the transcendent experience you're looking for in games, but
Front-Battle is simply fun.
Maybe not worth the extra $50 for the season pass, but... Grumble, grumble, they better be putting Rey in one of these expansions or I shall have to insert a razor-sharp tangent into my fanfiction with which to eviscerate the status quo. I mean I'll complain on the internet. I mean I'll keep it to myself. I mean okay bye.