When it first launched, Star Wars: Battlefront was a mess.

To be fair, it's not that EA and DICE's latest was a bad game — mechanically speaking, Battlefront worked well enough, and it's absolutely gorgeous, regardless of which platform you play on. However, back at launch, the weapon balance in Battlefront was a serious letdown.

Basically, anyone who'd played the game for long enough was at a huge advantage: high-level weapons would absolutely decimate new players, and the only way to counter it was to grind through lopsided matches. On top of that, anyone who preordered the game automatically unlocked the "DL-44" blaster — meaning that some players had already unlocked the most powerful gun in the game before the event started a match.

Battlefront's weapon balance has been tweaked several times since launch, but the DL-44, along with the Homing Launcher and Cycler Rifle, continued to dominate. Thankfully, EA and DICE included a new balance patch along with the recently-released DLC — and, for the first time since launch, Battlefront feels like it's worth playing.

Having reviewed both Halo 5: Guardians and Star Wars: Battlefront late last year, the DL-44 felt like the worst kind of oversight. Halo 5 launched with relatively fantastic weapon balance — while there have been some tweaks over the past few months, the game never felt downright unfair. Battlefront, on the other hand, was a mess: the DL-44 was everywhere, and it would destroy most players before they could even react. For a long while, it felt like players were being cheated simply because they hadn't preordered the game.

The DL-44 wasn't alone. The Cycler Rifle would dominate any range too long for the DL-44, and using Homing Launcher felt like hitting a "free kill" button. Most of the time, death felt like a punishment for simply trying to play; there was no defense against these weapons, and falling to them was simply inevitable.

Thankfully, the latest balance patch seemed to have fixed many of these issues. It's not the first time that the weapons of Battlefront have been adjusted, but patch 1.04 feels like the first time EA and DICE were willing to make drastic changes. Surprisingly, said changes have already affected how the community plays, and Battlefront is better for it.

Simply put, the aforementioned weapons no longer appear as frequently as they used to. The DL-44 is still an extremely popular (and powerful) gun — but it no longer feels like the two-hit monster it used to be. Homing Launchers are also far less of a nuisance now: even if an enemy player manages to lock on, grabbing cover before the missile hits is actually possible now. The Cycler Rifle is still the long-range weapon of choice, but damage drop-off based on range means that getting killed by a single pixel on the other side of the map isn't nearly as common as it used to be.

Thanks to the changes, weapon loadouts have greatly diversified. Yes, players will still run into their fair share of DL-44s, but for the most part, it feels like most fans are now playing with their favorite weapon — not just defaulting to an over-powered preorder bonus. As a result, matches are far more balanced and (more importantly) a hell of a lot more fun to play. Even after starting a new character all the way back at Level 1, I was still having a blast playing through all of the game's different modes.

Star Wars: Battlefront still has its fair share of problems. EA is still charging players an extra $50 for what feels like the second half of the game's content, and leveling up enough to use high-end weapons feels like a chore. It's still nearly impossible to play as a Hero character without camping the power-up spawn point, and several of the game's weapons feel like variations of the same gun.

That being said, Battlefront is no longer the infuriatingly unbalanced exercise in frustration that it used to be. Most matches are genuinely fun at any level, and it no longer feels like a single weapon is lording over the entire arsenal. In all honesty, I wasn't expecting my return to Battlefront to be as fun as it was. If you were one of the many players who ditched the game over balance issues at launch, give Battlefront another shot — you may be surprised by how much has changed.

Star Wars: Battlefront isn't a perfect game, but at least it's worth playing again.

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