[i]Star Wars Battlefront II[/i]'s campaign is merely okay, and its multiplayer is hamstrung by an awful upgrade system. There's also the spectre of loot boxes hanging over it like a Lightsaber of Damocles. However, it looks and sounds amazing, and gameplay-wise delivers the goods.

Life, as the internet has been known to observe, comes at you fast. Just ask Electronic Arts, which over the last couple of weeks has found Star Wars Battlefront II firmly in the crosshairs of an angry international gaming community even before it was officially released. Once the dreaded words “pay-to-win” were deployed, it was all on. Cue desperate damage control, the most downvoted Reddit comment of all time, rapid backpedalling, significant economy tweaks, (temporarily) abandoned microtransactions, and even stories of the heavy hand of Disney dropping onto EA shoulders to ask pointedly just what the hell they thought they were doing to the Star Wars name; it’s all certainly made for an interesting reviewing period.

OK though, but what about the actual game? It’s difficult to disentangle it from this mess – which, let’s face it, probably constitutes the most disastrous game launch since, say, No Man’s Sky. (It would be nice if we had to reach further back in time to find an example of a debacle of equal magnitude, but sadly the industry seems to be very good at very bad game launches.)

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