So here's the thing. , and I decided to do a little experiment. Each will suggest a game for the other that they wouldn't have usually picked up and we play that game for a week, then post about it in DA. Now, granted, a total of maybe 5 people even read these journals, I still plan on rambling on about it.

So, the game I got was Star Wars: Battlefront 2, a first person shooter in the, amazingly, Star Wars universe. Now, I've watched all Star Wars movies and have played trough the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series, and still I probably would have never picked this game up since I haven't even heard of it before Joel suggested it to me.

Now then, the game is basically Team Fortress but IN SPAAACE!! When you start the game (be it a mission in the campaign or just random play) you get to select a type of soldier you want to spawn as. You have your general all purpose guy, the guy with the rocket launcher, the sniper, the engineer and 2 special classes for each of the sides in the game. In the campaign itself you start off playing on the side of the Clones during the whole Clone Wars shindig and then later you get to play as a Stormtrooper when the Republic turns into the Galactic Empire. The game follows the movies pretty closely in the way that you even have the scene from the beginning of New Hope where Vader and the troopers burst into the space ship looking for her royal highness the princess.

Personally, I don't really like these "special characters" type of FPS where you are only allowed to carry 3-4 weapons and nothing more. I am not sure at what point exactly did not being able to carry lots of weapons become the norm (somewhere around the time Halo came out) but I am not happy with it. I used to like being able to carry 10 weapons and tons of ammo for them. It added to the "killing machine" spirit of most FPS games. But whatever, let's get on with it.

The difficulty curve during the missions is all over the place. Everything up to the mission where you go to kill the Jedi Council feels like a tutorial and you are barely met with any resistance at all. Then suddenly you end up in a very small space with lots of guys who kill you in 2 hits of their lightsabers....Not cool. And THEN after you somehow manage to wipe the buggers out you get to go to Naboo where you get your ass handed to you in the first few minutes. Maybe it's just me sucking so much at FPS (I've never been that into them) but I had a really hard time on those two missions...And then the mission after that is so piss easy you almost feel like you restarted the game or something. (I think that was the mission where you play as Boba Fett).

The whole medals and ranking system in the game sounds cool at first, but then you find out you need 64 medals of a kind in order to unlock the special weapon that they carry. Now with some this is easy but stuff like Marksman where you need to score 64 clean headshots with a sniper? Yeah that ain't gonna happen. Oh that brings me to another thing I disliked - a lot of the maps are closed and claustrophobic which makes them VERY sniper-unfriendly. The result of that is that 90% of the game I simply play as the default Clone/Storm trooper.

What else...oh, I couldn't actually finish the game because one of the missions stubbornly insists on freezing my PC very time I get to the last objective in it. I tried using a cheat code to unlock all of the mission maps but I can only play the missions individually and it doesn't actually push the story forward.

So that's that I guess. Not really a bad game and I suspect that multilayer would be lots of fun, so I'll probably be keeping it for a while when am in the mood to shoot things.