Battlefront Zero

Description
"Battlefront Zero," by MandeRek and the BF0 team, is a large-scale mappack and sides mod. It has 12 new maps and, in addition to conquest, features several new modes on some of those maps.

Battlefront Zero is, more-or-less, a Clone Wars-only mod. In addition to the requisite rainbow of legions, Battlefront Zero has several units and heroes featured in the Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars series (like the Spelunker droid), the LA Clone Wars series (Cad Bane, tactical droid), and the older game Galactic Battlegrounds (from the Clone Campaigns missions - Sev'rance Tann, Echuu Shen-Jon). It's nice to see several new models used, as this mod does, although the models (or retextures) range in quality from the better (Durge, Plo Koon) to the worse (Alderaan Guard, Wat Tambor).

The units are often fun and a nice change of pace, but I would like to see a bit better balance on some of the maps. I remember playing through a couple maps and noting how egregiously imbalanced the battle was in favor of one side (the favoring of the CIS on Felucia stood out in my mind here).

While it is nice to see new characters, those are - in my mind - mostly fluff anyway (in any mod they're in), and the real meat of the mod is always what it brings to the table in terms of new gameplay. For that reason, it's always great to see a new set of maps like this mod offers, although, like the characters, they range in quality. I think the better of the maps are Rhen Var, Kashyyyk, and probably Saleucami. Thule is nice too, but it (in addition to Geonosis: Arena) relies so heavily on Pandemic's "Clone Wars" models to create the setting, it's hard to tell what credit should be given to the mapper and what should be given to the modelers at Pandemic. I like the effort made with all the maps, and I think some could be really neat, but on some of the maps simple things like planning and object placement hold back the maps.

There were a couple new modes added for this. The most notable is "weapon conquest," which is really a minicampaign that uses a group of four clone commandos as the playable characters (with a hero available as well). This objective-based mode is always simple, but I don't think it needs to be complicated, necessarily, to be enjoyable. I would like to see a bit more of this as it stood out. There were a couple of other hunt modes, and then a "Jedi Hunt" (which was essentially hunt with a different name). Hunt modes are usually neat asides, and they were here too, but Jedi Hunt was notable in the fact that it quickly became a chore because of the overpower-ed-ness of the droids whenever they clumped together.

There were also several more generic bugs that could be found scattered through the maps and sides - award weapons bugs (particularly annoying when they cause a freeze), floating objects, objects with missing polies, missing sounds, missing localizations, floating HUD icons - there are still many things to be fixed before this can be considered close to "bug-free." There's a lot of neat new stuff in here, but for me, at least, I have a hard time enjoying it because there are a number of bugs to be found. I'd love to see these get fixed up and get this mod polished up, but for now this is certainly worth at least a try to see what the Battlefront Zero team has been working on.

-Mav