Category: Entertainment & Media

Star Wars Battlefront 2 is EA’s response to the heavy criticism received from 2015’s first Battlefront. This sequel includes a greatly needed single player campaign, tweaked gunplay, and even promises free downloadable content for players down the road. On paper, Battlefront 2 looks to be the solution to all the first game’s problems and more, but in reality it just trades in the old problems for a set of new ones. While in some ways a vast improvement over the original, Star Wars Battlefront 2 suffers from a convoluted campaign story and an unfair multiplayer progression system.

Developer DICE never puts out a game that is anything less than visually stunning, and Battlefront 2 is no exception. Every inch of this game is bursting with jaw-dropping visuals, from the life-like cutscenes with state of the art motion capture technology, to the gorgeous landscapes that capture every aspect of the Star Wars universe. Playing on my regular Xbox One I felt no need for the One X, as the game just looked that good running on standard hardware.

The sound design is right there on the same level, too. Everything from the sound of blasters firing to the wonderful orchestral music culminates in a truly living world that will have Star Wars fans drooling. If you’ve played the first Battlefront, you’re probably already familiar with what I’m talking about, and Battlefront 2 takes the ball and carries it even further, making it look and sound like an absolute marvel.

The best part of having faithful and beautiful visuals and sound design is that Battlefront 2 features a campaign for the first time. The story takes place between the events of Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, and focuses on Iden Versio, captain of the “Inferno Squad,” as the Galactic Empire reaches its demise in the face of the Rebel Alliance.

What makes this story special is that it attempts to humanize the Empire which, until now, has always simply been portrayed as the bad guys. The three members of Inferno squad are interesting, and the first couple of missions actually generated some remorse for the Empire that I have never experienced in all my years as a Star Wars fan. Unfortunately, the captivating story of Inferno Squad is short lived, as after the first handful of missions are complete, the story loses focus and turns into a Star Wars greatest hits, of sorts.

Missions start to push Iden and Inferno Squad to the side in favor of forcing unnecessary cameos of iconic Star Wars characters like Leia Organa, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Lando Calrissian. This intrusion of these characters not only doesn’t fit the story well, but it also forces Iden’s story to become condensed, making what should be a great story feel rushed and unbelievable. It’s sad because it almost feels like a group of executives at EA came to the development team at DICE and handed them a list of characters that needed to be incorporated into the campaign, which is too bad because the story that the game was originally on track to tell seems quite interesting. In the end, the story feels disingenuous and forced, and the pacing makes the character’s actions seem unjustified.

Gameplay wise the campaign is a lot of fun. It’s clear that the campaign was built around the multiplayer, which is the game’s main attraction, but the developers still managed to do a great job of making each level feel unique to the plot and interesting to explore. However, crafting a story mode around a multiplayer game does make some aspects of the campaign feel a little odd. For example, you can’t pick up enemy weapons, presumably because this isn’t part of the multiplayer, but it is a little backwards in a modern shooter to not be able to take fallen emery weapons. The campaign also features a loadout system that is eerily similar the the multiplayer’s. The only way to customize a character’s weapons and abilities is to find loadout crates scattered throughout the levels. It doesn’t hinder the experience all that much, but it is a bit of an odd design choice.

Space combat missions are prevalent throughout the five hour campaign, which made me feel like I spent just as much time flying as I did on foot. I usually tend to not like this kind of gameplay, but the controls are really intuitive, making flight combat easy, even for the most novice of players. That said, there were still one or two more space combat missions than I would have liked to play. For the most part the campaign is a good time. There’s a promising story that unfortunately doesn’t get fleshed out well, but it’s still a fun ride from start to finish.

Multiplayer is where the game gets a little more shaky. Among the eleven maps and five game modes is a decent variety of ways to play. Gun play has been readjusted and shooting feels more satisfying than ever before. Tons of customizable options are available for each fighting class, vehicle class, and even heroes. Aside from your overall level, you’re able to level up your individual classes and then unlock new abilities and boosts, as well as upgrades to your existing weapons. Again, on paper everything sounds great, but the execution results in a pretty convoluted and tedious progression system.

Credits are earned through gameplay and can be used towards the purchase of creates. At the time of writing this review, EA has temporarily disabled all in-game purchases that can be made with real money, so throughout my time playing, credits were the only way I could purchase crates. However, theoretically players would be able to skip the process of playing matches and be able to use real currency to purchase crates, giving somewhat of an unfair advantage over players that are unlocking items the normal route by simply playing matches.

The crates contain everything from new Star Cards, which are used for boosting and upgrading your classes, to new weapons, emotes and victory poses for you characters, vehicles, and Crafting Parts, which can be used to upgrade weapons. When EA announced this overwhelming progression system, players were quite furious, as many saw it as a “pay-to-win” system. After spending hours online in Battlefront 2, I can confirm that I did feel like I encountered scenarios where I was simply underpowered due to the fact that I didn’t have enough unlockables. Those that pre-ordered the deluxe edition of the game, or played earlier before the game was fully released were able to get their hands on some pretty lucrative crates, and as a result, many newer players, like myself, were at a severe disadvantage.

I don’t want to get too into the weeds with how EA should have done things differently, or how their in-game purchases are a poor business practice; there are already plenty of other people on the internet criticizing this game for that. Instead, I want to boil down this fiasco to the real problem that results from this tough progression system, and that’s that Battlefront 2 is significantly less fun.

Modern online shooters have latched onto the idea that players should be rewarded for playing despite their skill level, but Battlefront 2′s approach couldn’t be further from that. If you’re a more novice player, and you don’t play bigger modes like Galactic Assault cooperatively with a squad, you’re probably not going to have a good time. In DICE’s defense, this is largely the type of game they’re known for making, but it’s still a disappointment considering that Star Wars is the most beloved thing in pop culture so naturally this game will entice players from a wide range of skills. It’s just too bad that Battlefront 2 favors more hardcore and skilled players over everyone else.

The more challenging nature of the gameplay leads to a significantly less rewarding progression system for most players, and that’s pretty frustrating when considering how difficult it is in the first place to unlock new abilities and items. Crates aren’t always going to get you what you want. For example, you may receive doubles of the same card, or unlocks for your heavy class when you’re trying to earn unlocks for your assault class. This tedious and grindy approach left me not caring what I unlocked because the rewards simply didn’t seem worth the effort.

Lastly there are the heroes, which have been drastically changed. To play as a hero, you first have to purchase them via game credits, which can take a while to earn. Then once you’ve purchased a hero character, you can customize their abilities and powers through the same monotonous progression system that is used for your regular character. To use a hero in game, you’ll have to earn enough Battle Points in a match. This is done by completely objectives and getting lots of kills. Unfortunately it takes a lot of Battle Points to be able to use a hero, and that mostly limits them to more skilled players. I wish DICE had taken a more Titanfall-inspired approach that offers a chance for every player to use a hero at least once per match. This is especially frustrating when considering that you have to grind so hard just to unlock the ability to use the hero in the first place.

I don’t mean to be completely down on the multiplayer. The maps are well designed, the mode variety offers something for everyone, and there is even Arcade mode, which offers offline multiplayer against AI with up to two players split screen. There’s a lot here, it’s just unfortunate how grueling the progression system is and how much the game skews towards skilled players.

In short, Star Wars Battlefront 2 is in some ways an improvement over its predecessor. Gunplay is better than ever before, the introduction of a campaign is a welcomed one, despite its shortcomings, and the multiplayer offers great variety, despite its unfavorable progression system. It’s hard to think fans of the first game won’t find things to love about this followup, there really is a lot of good here. It’s just too bad that EA let what should have been a huge victory for them become such a nightmare with all the paid content and the messy progression elements. I’m not done with Battlefront 2 just yet, and there is still some promising free DLC on the horizon. I just wish this game came came out swinging like everyone hoped.

For more on Star Wars Battlefront 2, check out our playthrough of “Mission to Pilliar” below.

Disneyland Adventures is a remaster of the 2011 Xbox 360 game Kinect: Disneyland Adventures. The original was a testament to the technology of the Kinect in its early days, whereas the rerelease serves as an apology for the Kinect’s very existence. This remaster looks to bury the past by adding controller support, some tweaked visuals, as well as 4K resolution for the Xbox One X and HRD support for both the Xbox One X and Xbox One S. Unfortunately, the end result is a sloppy game that suffers from frame rate drops, rendering issues, and vapid gameplay. Despite being a love letter to Walt Disney’s original Magic Kingdom, Disneyland Adventures fails to capture much of the magic that the park has been producing daily for over sixty years.

I won’t lie, I want to love everything about Disneyland Adventures. The very idea of crafting a perfect recreation of Disneyland into a video game for park fans to fumble through and gawk at all the little details sounds incredible, and in a sense this game is just that. The park has been faithfully rebuilt circa 2011, and as someone who spent a week at Disneyland just this past summer, I can confidently confirm that this game looks strikingly similar to the real deal.

Everything from the window displays on Mainstream U.S.A. to the neon sign on The Star Trader in Tomorrowland does an excellent job of bringing you back to the feeling of actually being in the park. The music in each land is perhaps the single greatest part of the game. Each land is filled with faithful background music that brought my fanboy senses to the height of utter, joyous bliss. Seemingly every square inch of the park looks phenomenal in terms of being faithful to the actual park, but the facade begins to fade when it comes to the shops, restaurants, and attractions.

Shops and restaurants are almost all inaccessible. Some shops are open, but you don’t get to go in and explore. Instead, you load into a shop menu where you can purchase outfits and pins for your avatar. Of course this is a video game with goals of characters progression and real gameplay mechanics, so I can’t blame the game for needing a place to house these options, but it just felt like such a letdown that the park was so faithfully recreated, while none of the shops and restaurants received similar treatment. I can only imagine how much greater the exploration element would be if I could go through the nooks and crannies of each shop and restaurant.

What’s worse is the park attractions. All of the big E ticket attractions are soulless mini games that take too long to load, and are mostly too boring to hold one’s attention for more than a minute. Of course one of this game’s selling points is the mini games, and it isn’t supposed to be a full fledged simulator. But I think I would have been happier wandering through faithful recreations of the queues and experiencing virtual ride throughs of the attractions than actually playing most of these mini games.

The mini games were designed with full body motion controls in mind, so playing them with a traditional gamepad actually feels reductive. The mini games are rudimentary and simply no fun using a controller. Most of the games involve some form of auto movement, while the player swings the character left and right to collect coins and avoid obstacles. The attractions theme may differ from ride to ride, but the mini game are fundamentally the same. However, a notable exception to this is the “it’s a small world” mini game, that serves as a rhythm game, albeit a pedestrian one. I had a hard time getting my Kinect to work properly when I tried the game using motion controls and I honestly only wanted to use a regular controller, ultimately leaving me to feel unsatisfied with most of the mini games. If anything, the only redeemable aspect of the mini games are the fun cut scene animations that play before each one. Each attraction gets its own backstory inspired by the actual ride, the movie it’s based on, or a classic Disney cartoon, in the case of the “Matterhorn Bobsleds” game.

Some of the smaller attractions in the game, such as “Dumbo the Flying Elephant,” “Gadget’s Go Coaster,” and “Mad Tea Party” actually have ride through simulation animations, akin to games like Roller Coaster Tycoon. I loved being able to hop on these rides and see a recreation of them like I was actually back at Disneyland, but it only furthered my frustration that I couldn’t experience bigger attractions in the same way.

The park is filled with 40 iconic Disney characters that players can interact with and accept menial tasks from. You can take pictures together, get autographs, hug, dance, and high five with each character, and usually each character will send you on a string of quests to complete. The objectives are usually insultingly easy and monotonous, again, re-emphasizing that this game was initially built as a Kinect game, so the actual mechanics are pretty light. You’ll gather materials for characters, relay information to other characters, and pretty much repeat this over and over again.

Occasionally a character will reward you with an item that you can then keep in your inventory. Items include a magic wand, a camera, a megaphone, and more. Items like the camera can be useful, while most of the items are just there to allow players to interact with random objects that will release exorbitant amounts of coins for no good reason. If it was really this easy to come across money while visiting a Disney theme park, I think Disney would be out of the business by now.

Disneyland Adventures biggest issue is that it’s plagued with performance issues. The frame rate is a mess, and environments usually look bland in the distance as textures can take quite a while to load in. Sometimes, I would have to leave an area or quit the game altogether to fix the visual issues I was experiencing. To be clear, I was playing on a day one Xbox One. The game has been updated to take advantage of some of the Xbox One X’s power, so perhaps things run a little better on the X. However to me, there is no real explanation as to why a six year old game is performing so poorly on a console that was released two years later. My guess is that this remaster has been poorly optimized, which is a shame because it detracts from the game’s strongest feature, its exploration.

Overall, Disneyland Adventures fails to create a memorable and exciting experience for Disney fans. Obviously the game has been made for a wide audience, but it seems to fall short of being a great experience even for younger players. It’s easy to think that some younger players may be able to overlook the game’s issues and have fun anyway, but with such uninspired mechanics and so many technical issues, I can’t easily recommend this game. Perhaps if you are just that big of a Disney Parks fan, the $30 isn’t too bad just to get a taste of this virtual recreation of Disneyland, but its charm wanes quick.

For more on Disneyland Adventures, check out our video showing off the first 20 minutes of the game.

According to CNBC:

21st Century Fox has been holding talks to sell most of the company to Walt Disney Co., leaving behind a media company tightly focused on news and sports, according to people familiar with the situation.

The talks have taken place over the last few weeks and there is no certainty they will lead to a deal. The two sides are not currently talking at this very moment, but given the on again, off again nature of the talks, they could be revisited.

For Fox, the willingness to engage in sale talks with Disney stems from a growing belief among its senior management that scale in media is of immediate importance and that there is not a path to gain that scale in entertainment through acquisition. The company is said to believe that a more tightly focused group of properties around news and sports could compete more effectively in the current marketplace.

The media landscape has changed considerably in recent years with giants such as Facebook, Google (Alphabet), Amazon and Netflix changing the way people consume media and dominating the digital distribution of digital video content. Being able to compete in that changing landscape, many people believe, requires scale that a Disney has, but 21st Century Fox does not.

For Disney, the opportunity to take control of another movie studio and significant TV production assets as it readies a direct-to-consumer entertainment streaming offering is attractive as is Fox’s significant exposure to international markets, such as the U.K., Germany and Italy — both through its networks and 39 percent ownership of Sky. Disney recently announced it will pull all of its movies from the Netflix platform and will establish two direct-to-consumer offerings: one for sports and one including its key franchises such as “Star Wars” and Marvel.

Disney would not purchase all of Fox, according to people with knowledge of the talks.
Bob Iger (L), CEO of Walt Disney Co. and Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corp.

The company could not own two broadcast networks and would therefore not buy the Fox broadcast network. It would not buy Fox’s sports programming assets in the belief that combining them with ESPN could be seen as anti-competitive from an antitrust standpoint and it would not buy the Fox News or Business channel. Disney would also not purchase Fox’s local broadcasting affiliates, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

In addition to the movie studio, TV production and international assets such as Star and Sky, Disney would also add entertainment networks such as FX and National Geographic.

The contemplated structure of the deal or the price that has been discussed could not be learned. Given it would involve the sale of many, but not all of Fox’s properties, it’s unclear how Fox would mitigate potential tax consequences of a deal.

Officials at Disney and Fox declined to comment.