We all know about the origins of this game. All the microtransaction drama created by EA. All of that has been fixed, mostly. The multiplayer is fun a hell and does a great job of making you feel like you're in a Star Wars battle. All of the trooper models look fantastic and play great.
Now a major complaint from BF1 was there was no story mode. BF2 attempts to fix that by adding a campaign taking place after the fall of the Empire as the last remnants of it struggle to keep the power after the fall of the Emperor. It's a solid setting to a SW game, but unfortunately the MP game play doesn't work in singleplayer.
The MP gameplay feel doesn't fit well with story missions. You just aimlessly run around and shoot waves of enemies in most missions. There's no cover mechanic to make it playable and enjoyable. The MP game play is good within the confines of a MP match. It's gameplay made to be fair to both people battling against each other as you're gonna die fast and respawn and attempt to capture locations. The game play DOES NOT fit single player missions. There's also NO combat roll which would help like it does in the MP.
Besides the gameplay not matching, the missions of the game just aren't done well. You mostly follow Iden Versio, a special ops leader in the Empire. She is sent to save important Empire targets to ensure the fall doesn't happen. Soon into the campaign she realizes she was on the wrong side when the Empire is willing to sacrifice it's citizens for it's own survival. You follow her turn to the rebellion as she attempts to help to make up for her past service to the bad side.
Interspersed between Iden's missions are really bad filler missions where in each you play as Luke, Leia, Han, and Lando. The versions of those characters you play as are the hero classes in the multiplayer. Their missions are really tedious and just waves of enemies for like 15 mins. Lukes mission? He teams up with a stranded member of Iden's troop to fight bugs for 10 mins. Literally you have to protect the Empire guy while he fixes something from waves of bugs. There's no real challenge as you just wave your lightsaber around until they're all dead.
There's also really bad attempts at humor with Han Solo's mission thanks to a really bad side character. The writers just comes off as lazy when they start to name the mission objective's with sarcastic lines from the bad dialogue. It just seems like even they knew making this campaign was a waste of time.
Flying missions are also just tedious. Shoot a few star fighters, shoot something else. The flying does not feel good either. It somewhat works for MP as you're gonna die over and over, but here it just doesn't feel good. You'll just be spinning around an around trying to shoot enemies. Something like Crimson Skies or the original Tie Fighter have great air combat, this is just fly in circles as you try to shoot enemies.
The ONLY bright spot of the campaign is Shriv a really fun character that I'd like to appear elsewhere in SW media.
The devs could have easily spent all the time making the campaign and just added more maps to the multiplayer. It's so inconsequential and half baked. Not every game has to have a single player component. When it's forced like this you get a poorly structured re-use of the MP assets. Some new stuff is made for it, but the added hero story missions are just re-used MP maps. You can just tell they didn't have enough to work with in the Iden story, so they artificially padded it out with these tedious hero missions.
The multiplayer is the reason to get this game, for $15 it's a really fun time with it. The campaign is just a waste of time and not fun at all, so skip it.
