Overview: First Strike is basically SW: Battlefront 2, but for Battlefield 2142. It’s somewhat underwhelming as it doesn’t really take much advantage of the engine.
Plot:
Gameplay: Imagine SW: Battlefront 2, but with better graphics. All this mod amounts to is a shoddy copy of Battlefront 2 or a simplified Battlefield 2142. You’d think they would’ve exploited the Titan Mode for awesome capital ship battles in space. Sadly, all the capital ships in the space battles are uncontrollable and pretty much motionless, and the mod doesn’t even use the commander feature either.
Graphics: As I said before, the graphics are much better than SW: Battlefront 2 but they aren’t as good as Battlefield 2142’s graphics. I’m not a graphic sage so I usually don’t have much to say on this subject.
Sound: Instead of using the iconic actual Star Wars soundtrack, they replaced it with mediocre filler orchestra music. John Williams will NOT kill you in your sleep for using his music in a Star Wars mod. In my playtime, I only heard the Star Wars theme once, which is disappointing for a Star Wars centric mod. Surprisingly the sound effects are much better. Sure the X-Wings don’t sound like X-Wings, but the guns are pretty accurate.
Reviewer’s Final Opinion: I’m aware of the fact that the developers of this mod did a lot of hard work in creating this, it just seems merely average to me. Nothing really new. But if you’re a devoted follower of Star Wars games/mods, you should definitely download this and give it a try.
IT’S A TRAP!
That was my orignal tagline for the review box but riley had to go and fuck it up.
Did this guy play the mod for more than 20 minutes? Star Wars Battlefront is an arcade shooter for children, it requires no teamwork or coordination. Maybe this reviewer has never played 2142 either, I didn’t see space battles in 2142, did you? Yet you say “it doesn’t really take much advantage of the engine.” Pittah…
Graphics, maybe not the most amazing, but they are on par with 2142 from what I’ve seen, and 2142 lacks the enormous objects First Strike has implemented like, the Star Destroyer, TO SCALE. Just a little FYI, our Star Destroyer is bigger than half of the 2142 maps are. And then there are the capitol ships which have full 3D movement and due to the LIMITATIONS of the 2142 we cannot make them work with interiors. It was tested, and it failed. Unless you want to walk on the ceiling or clip through the ships when it moves, our capitol ships move pretty fast, if you could compare them to say, Battlefronts, which are all stationary. So how did we copy that POS again?
As for sound, yea we could just rip off sound from JW like the countless other SW fan creations, but we had a whole new soundtrack made for our mod, and it’s absolutely great, you can’t put down all the music, as it’s a matter of opinion if YOU like it or not, it’s not like the music quality/compression was poor.
My opinion: This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, just played the mod for 45 minutes, got confused by its complexity and left under his own conclusion that it was too simplistic, yet it’s quite the opposite if you just dig into the skin a bit.
Also, next time you write a REVIEW for something link to it’s website so people know WTF you are talking about, seems a good idea to me. Shouldn’t a reviewer know these things?
http://www.fsmod.com
Well this is a rather disappointing review. From all the others we’ve had (actual television, game magazines, all the players in-game, and even the developers at DICE themselves), we’ve been told we’d done a very high class piece of work. No one has ever said after playing that when they felt this was a cheap SWBF knockoff.
This is, though, assuming you actually played our game. From reading your review one can almost assume that you have not. On most of our space maps the teams are in direct control of both fighters/bombers and full fledged capital ships.
Likewise if you were informed you would know that the Titan mode for 2142 doesn’t truly work either. The engine does not support players-on-moving-vehicles. As our maps call for such things we chose not to try and do something that is not possible.
But speaking of the engine, perhaps I should list a few of the ways in which the mod does either meet or exceed “engine utilization”:
1) customization system built off the weapon unlocks
More vehicles than BF2142
2) Squad-reward equipment
3) Deployable weaponry
4) enhanced droid support
5) multiple new gamemodes (including objective-based maps)
6) Our own stat ranking system
7) segregated Officer kits for the Squadleaders and Commanders (which, incidentally, we do have. )
9) Greater effects than 2142
10) dynamic lighting on all of our blasters (and we have a lot of blasters). There is almost no dynamic lighting used in 2142.
11) spacemaps
12) Massive battlefields (our space maps are 8km per side. That’s 64km squared not even taking into account the factor of altitude. Most BF2/2142 maps are 1-2km per side, so 1-4km squared. With 2142 the average engagement range is 200-400 metres. Our engagement range on our space maps is 3km-3000 metres-so you’re quite literally fighting people at ranges longer than that of almost any 2142 map. Our ground maps are also much larger and epic in scope)
13) A fully fleshed out, in depth combat system. This game was built from the ground up. All the weapons have specialised scenarios and uses yet every class is capable of acting upon almost any situation.
14) Expanded gear concepts to 2142 (and indeed beat 2142 to several items). To name a few things, we have full size shield generators, functioning gas grenades, sensor beacons, handheld scanning devices, more full fledged droids, EMP rifles, and a massive amount of explosives to compliment all the blaster weapons.
15) We have 5 kits, 2142 only has (and indeed normally supports) 4
16) We have our own classical musical composition and score. Unlike what this review purports it is of very high quality, as is the entirely new VO system and extensive sound effect library.
17) Fully controllable capital ships
18) excellently done graphics
19) A game designed to provide epic star-wars combat, not minor 1-2 man skirmishes
20) All done completely for free
I suppose that’s as random a list as one can make it. What it does try to highligh though is that in every area we’ve either met or exceeded 2142 or SWBF. The graphics are top knotch, the sounds are extremely well done, the game system is designed almost countless ways to create massive battlefields and natural teamwork, the weapons/gear/classes are all very well balanaced, you get command of everything, from the standard-issue soldier’s knife to TIE fighters and Nebulon B space cruisers. And anyone who has ever worked in the BF engine knows, accomplishing anything is almost impossible. Doing everything that we’ve done is beyond belief. We’ve pushed the engine further than either DICE or any other mod out there, and we’re more than happy with the accomplishments.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. Check it out yourself:
http://www.fsmod.com
Official Trailer:
In-Game Combat trailer:
http://www.bf-news.de/inhalt-page,First-Strike-Spieleabende-presented-by-BF-Newsde,2,2975.html
Sorry, missed the official trailer link (the website went nuts and just posted it before I could dig it up):
Official trailer:
http://files.filefront.com/FirstStrike+teaser+finalavi/;10342635;/fileinfo.html
Also a better link to the gameplay trailer:
http://files.filefront.com/First+Strike+Trailer/;9827430;/fileinfo.html
Well, from my playtime expirience I could not find an option to spawn in a capital ship. Only to spawn in an X-wing fighter. Also I see nothing in the manual about controllable star destroyers. But just to be safe a re-review is in order.
Also your new soundtrack is still not as great as the orignal.
and by orignal I mean john williams.
This review was indeed too harsh. Please don’t let this single review keep you from reading and enjoying our reviews/previews.
Also keep in mind that none of our staff owned BF2142 so we had to hire on a freelancer.
This review was obviously not thought completely through. I thought the complete opposite when playing this game. GREAT graphics, and I absolutely loved the soundtrack they made. Hey, it isn’t the original, but I like a bit of a twist to the constant “duhhhhhh duh” etc. playing over and over again. Disregard this review! In my opinion this game should get 4.5/5 stars. (Only because It gets kind of repetative).
what a great game.
I agree completely…
Consumer, if you never saw the option to spawn in a capital ship then obviously you have not reviewed enough. Every single space map has a different gamemode, some use capital ships and some don’t. We can’t move the star destroyer due to the engine’s limitations. People lag when 2 titans move think about the lag when you have a star destroyer 500 times the size of a titan moving.
Also when you rate the music, do you take into perspective that if we just stuck in John William’s sound track we would be sued by John Williams himself? Do you take into account that John Williams was paid thousands of dollars to make that song and our sound guy gets paid nothing? Even when you’re rating music you rate it on the quality of the compression not whether or not it’s identical to John Williams. I can’t believe that you have the nerve to say we didn’t take advantage of the 2142 engine. When the team went to the DICE studios and met the team members of DICE, DICE could not believe what they did with the engine. And DICE made the engine themselves.
1. This is nothing like Star Wars battlefront 2, It is not nearly as much as an arcade game as that is and it’s much more lore accurate. Did SWBF2 have the Battle of yavin, Rhen Var, Ryloth, or Movable Capital ships? No.
2. We added 6 more game modes to the 2142 engine. We added space to the game. We added 5 new classes. Simplified Battlefield 2142? I think not
3. I requested that you start reviewing when 1.25 came out, the capital ships were broken in 1.2
4. Titan mode is hardcoded into the game and we can’t use most of the things that it has.
5. Commander is in patch 1.25 and it is only used to direct troops. Like I said before, this mod is based on teamwork.
6. The Squad leaders have a UAV, a Deployable Turret, and a Squad beacon.
7. You seem to address the Battle of Taloraan only. This is 1 out of 12 maps and the majority of these maps are land maps.
8. Battlefield 2142 automatically dumbs down the graphics for us making it so they can’t look any better
9. John Williams would sue us if we used his music.
10. John William’s songs were all with an orchestra.
11. X-wing sounds were taken directly from the movie
12. You say that we didn’t add anything new for the star wars games. How about the first star wars game that you actually have to use teamwork?
Overall it appears that there was little to no effort taken into this review. You obviously played it for no more than an hour and have not played all the maps. This mod does have a learning curve unlike most simple star wars games. If you do a re-review please read the FS wiki and actually play the game long enough to understand it. http://firststrikemod.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
I would say thank you for your time but obviously little or no time was used. We are VERY open to criticism but almost all the criticism in this review wasn’t accurate. Please do a re-review
Thanks for putting up another review.
John williams didn’t sue people when they inserted his music into star wars jedi knight jedi academy without his permission.
I have played almost every single Star Wars game from Dark Forces to Star Wars Galaxies. I have seen all the movies.
I have played First Strike alot.
I can say that this is simply the best Star Wars game ever made.
Although not perfect, It is the highest quality, most immersive, realistic, and accurate Star Wars game of them all.
You feel you are in the movies more than any other Star Wars game ever made.
Maybe because it was published by Lucas arts? George Lucas has permission from JW to use his songs.
but modders who inserted duel of the fates, which was not orignally in jedi academy, did not have permission from john williams. Neither did the moviebattles 2 staff.
Consumerist, it doesn’t matter if they used John Williams music or not. I’m more impressed that they went a different route then other SW mods and made their own.
Consumerist, George Lucas has every right to sue those modders who put the duel of fates in it. Are you really criticizing us for going through the work of recreating the essence of a john williams song without actually mimicking the song? Our sound guy spent countless days working on all of the songs in the mod, and if you actually played more than 2 maps in the mod you would notice that there are some star wars themes placed in our songs. It’s obvious that you did not even bother to load the battle of yavin (death star)
But george lucas didn’t sue them. And I did load the battle of yavin. You don’t need to tell me where hte battle of yavin takes place.