Ultimate Battlefront: The Clone Wars

Description
Ultimate Battlefront: The Clone Wars is Xavious's take on a large-scale single era mod, and in my opinion, thus far it is the best of the bunch. This mod includes a whole slew of new content, including several different clone legions as well as five new maps (in addition to all the stock maps the mod is added to) to play Ultimate Battlefront on.

I'll be honest and say that I am not a huge fan of Clone Wars-themed mods in general, usually because they exploit the fact that clones came in every color of the rainbow to have the appearance of a lot of content. Different skins are well and good, but in my opinion four or five textures for the same model is so much fluff when compared to the things that really matter - content, gameplay, etc. It's because of those reasons, and not the fluff (although the fluff is done well, as it is in most clone-legion based mods), that I prefer this over similar sides mods which don't really feel like they include a whole lot of anything new.

Now, I know that in light of that paragraph it will sound funny for me to switch back and talk about the fluff, but I do want to make a note of one of the things I appreciate most about this - the visual consistency of the mod. So often, clone wars legions look like what they often are - compilations of a bunch of different people's work - but in this, Xavious took the time to make each different legion fairly visually consistent across the board - the quality of the textures is all notably the same, no matter what the legion, and they all sort've "fit" together. Basically, it is apparent that they are all the work of one person, and I appreciate and recognize the work that is put into making a lot of your own assets for a mod. The textures are all done well, too.

In any case, the meat of the mod is the sides and how they play. I like Xavious's sides here because they are original without being too wild. The weapons are (again with the consistency) well-done across the board, and I like the small sound changes made for some of them. I enjoy seeing some tweaked particle effect work, and I think the blaster explosions are well-done and fit nicely. There are a number of nice new weapons (some of which you may recognize from his earlier 607th work) that are, as mentioned above, different, but still feel like they fit with the more stock weapons.

Another thing I appreciated was that Xavious included a number of new maps with his mod. I think it's really important for anyone making a sides mod to include something new - whether it's new modes or new maps - something has to be there so that you're not just playing stock maps with stock modes with only the sides changed. In this case, there are five new maps - Abregado Rae, Dantooine, Geonosis, Geonosis: Arena, and Jaal-Kan.

The first and last maps in that list were probably the best - I think overall, I enjoyed the design of Abregado Rae the most, and Jaal-Kan did a nice job of feeling like a unique setting. On the other hand, I inwardly groan (sometimes outwardly too) whenever I see another Geonosis map, and here there are two. The first is exactly what you see on the tin - a recreation of the Geonosis battle from Episode II. It's a solidly-built map (and I think the lighting in it is really nice), but I don't think it's extraordinary - it feels a lot like SWBF1 Geonosis. Geonosis: Arena is very similar to every other Geonosis Arena map we've seen (they all use essentially the same models), but I feel confident in saying that this is the best of the bunch. That's not to say I wouldn't have preferred to see something that wasn't Geonosis, but at least this is Geonosis done right. Dantooine is the only map I've not mentioned. It's a nice map, but it feels a little "plain." And by plain I mean flat land. Because it's a plain.

...okay, sorry.

In any case, while it's well put-together, I'd like to see it a little more detailed. I know, too, that Xavious had some more maps planned for this, and some of them looked pretty neat - I'm looking forward to seeing them as well!

Ultimate Battlefront isn't without its bugs. It's a very well put-together mod, but there was at least one unit I found with an awards weapon bug (EMP trooper), and I'm pretty sure there are probably at least a couple sounds bugs - the easy one for me to check for (I did, and I did hear the bug) is whether force lightning sounds are present on certain stock maps. Normally that'd be a really minor nitpick, but since I've had to fix those kind of bugs twice through for two major mods of my own, I feel compelled to lay that burden on anyone else who's making a large mod.

All in all, it's a great mod and worth your download. Give it a try!

-Mav

P.S. As a reminder, you will need the [url=http://starwarsbattlefront.filefront.com/file/Unofficial_Star_Wars_Battlefront_II_v13_Patch;95418]Unofficial v1.3 Patch[/url] to play this mod. Please download it and install it if you do not have it installed already.