If I could, I would spend hours in the world of Hyper Light Breaker doing nothing in particular. I’d settle my character on the edge of a bright pastel cliff and gaze into the distance, where crumbling skyscrapers and strange rock formations silhouette against a neon sky. I’d let the soothing electronic soundtrack wash over me and observe the way the day/night cycle changed the Shadow of the Colossus-sized broadsword protruding from the earth in the distance. Maybe I’d see if a friend wanted to chat with this ‘80s sci-fi novel cover as a backdrop, before hopping on a hoverboard and skating off into that whimsical, colorful horizon to see what’s beyond.

But Hyper Light Breaker will not let me roleplay truancy. I’m in the Overgrowth with a purpose: hunting the minions of the Abyss King. For my hands-on preview, developer Heart Machine plunked me into a pre-generated world suitable for a beginner, though in the full game each run will take place in a unique, procedurally generated world. My first foes are little slime creatures easily dispatched with a few sword swings. And I’m delighted to find that each hit feels just as solid and chonky as I hoped back in my original hands-off preview last year. Around a bend are bigger enemies – humanoid creatures with a bit more speed and damage behind them – so I take advantage of a homing melee attack to successfully chain together smooth combos between enemies. A bit further on, I fire a battery-powered gun to dispatch some snipers so I can safely proceed up a steep hill.

I tried three different pre-built loadouts for the demo, though in the final game you’ll be able to customize them however you like. My favorite melee weapon is a pair of knives, fast and snappy but weaker, and I struggle more with an enormous, slow, and hard-hitting broadsword. A shotgun proves useful against packs of wolves, but I like the subtle but helpful snap-aiming feature of the pistol when I spot some weird one-eyed bats flapping around in a nearby forest. As I expected, my favorite special ability drops a giant cube on the heads of everyone in front of me. It’s effective when I’m surrounded and struggling, which I often am, because even in an early demo area Hyper Light Breaker isn’t especially forgiving. I left the demo retaining a vendetta against a giant tree monster that took me out in just a few whacks, and I’m told that guy wasn’t even a boss monster!

Hyper Light Breaker is an extraction roguelike, so while I spent a lot of the demo just putzing around getting a feel for different cool glow swords, it turns out that’s (mostly) a valid strategy early on. The player’s goal is to defeat the Abyss King, who can only be unlocked by besting a series of boss monsters scattered across different biomes in a single run, who in turn are only unlocked by completing a number of other tasks out in the world, most of which also include defeating enemies. The bosses themselves are hard. I met a wolf-themed one that landed on my head and kicked my inexperienced butt in about five seconds flat. Maybe having friends around will help, as Hyper Light Breaker will feature online co-op. But even so, instead of beelining to these guys, early runs at Hyper Light Breaker will largely involve running around, killing smaller stuff, finding upgrades, and taking it to certain points on the map to be extracted and saved for future runs. Then leave before you get killed, and start afresh. Sometimes it’s better to quit while you’re ahead.

With some enemies cleared out I’m able to hop on a hoverboard and scoot around the environment a little, riding over water and neatly gliding down hills. Hyper Light Breaker takes some cues from Solar Ash’s parkour, especially evident in the smooth way you can swoop up on ledges that are juuuuust too high or chain airdashes into other moves. I liked the on-foot movement and the ways in which it gracefully melded into combat, but I’ll just say it: I wish the hoverboard was cooler! It’s a little slow and clunky! I hope they can lean into the Solar Ash of it all and make it feel a little faster and a little more epic.

Missing from the demo was any clue as to Hyper Light Breaker’s story. I did get to run around a little hub town briefly and enjoy its cyberpunk fusions of nature and tech, populated by an adorable cast of NPCs. But none of them spoke to me in this demo. Like Hyper Light Drifter, I’m told Breaker’s story is told in images and not words, and given the pedigree of the studio I’m expecting something lovely. But for now, all I know is I’m a person with a cool sword and a cool gun who keeps going out into the Overgrowth to chase down an Abyss King. I know my ultimate verdict on Breaker is going to hinge heavily on how well it can weave a story through a multiplayer, roguelike structure, but given the excellence of Drifter, I’m willing to let Heart Machine keep its secrets just a little bit longer.

My demo of Hyper Light Breaker largely confirmed everything I’d hoped and expected when I first saw the game a year ago. It’s mysterious and colorful, movement feels good and combat satisfying, enemies are challenging, customization holds promise, and the music belongs on vinyl. Above all, the sheer vibes are impeccable. I feel like I’m walking around an episode of .hack//sign, or that I’ve somehow fallen 5000 years into the future on another planet. I can’t wait to step beyond baby’s first biome and figure out what it all means.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Two decades on from its original launch, Star Wars Battlefront is suffering a disaster of a re-release. Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection, a compilation featuring the first two games in the series, is a messier than a Jawa that swallowed a thermal detonator thanks to server problems, bugs, and more. What was at first a highly-anticipated re-release has become the target of overwhelmingly negative reviews on Steam.

20 years ago, it was a different story entirely. Released on PC, PlayStation 2, and Xbox in September 2004, the same day the classic Star Wars trilogy hit DVD, Battlefront signaled a new era for LucasArts. Under a new president, marketing vet Jim Ward, the publisher had bet big on the idea of a third-person arcade shooter with potential for massive online multiplayer battles. By packaging a playable Xbox demo with the new box set of movies, and using remastered footage from the DVDs in the game’s single-player campaigns, LucasArts aimed for mass appeal on a whole new scale. The publisher’s old guard had found critical success with niche titles from studios like BioWare or Totally Games. But for years Star Wars — one of the most beloved and recognizable brands on the big screen — had struggled financially in the realm of video games.

Star Wars: Battlefront was met with fairly favorable reviews, but the real story was in sales. Within three years, Battlefront moved more than 4 million units. BioWare’s hit RPG Knights of the Old Republic sold 3 million copies by the end of its third year, but Battlefront had taken half as long to develop — and on a limited budget.

The shooter offered a large-scale combat experience on planets fans knew and loved, yet there was also the novelty of playing as a humble foot soldier. You got to play as the bad guys, sure, but TIE Fighter had pulled off that same trick a decade earlier. Battlefront felt special in large part because you were not Dash Rendar or Darth Revan or Kyle Katarn. You were nobody. As I wrapped up the Galactic Civil War campaign back in 2004, on Cloud City and then Endor, I understood even then that this was the appeal of Battlefront’s fantasy — you were just some guy in Star Wars, a few feet out of frame when Emperor Palpatine met his end.

I’m not immune to the charms of flying an ARC-170, or dashing into battle as Aayla Secura with a pair of laser swords, but I do think the Battlefront series lost something when the sequel arrived. Released five months after George Lucas’s 2005 feature, Revenge of the Sith, Battlefront II took the vision for the first game and maxed it out in every direction, adding space combat, playable Jedi and Sith, and of course more locations from the films. A proposed third entry in the series, developed by Free Radical Design, pushed the tech even further with seamless ground-to-air combat before its eventual cancellation in 2008.

In May of 2013, six months after Disney acquired Lucasfilm, Electronic Arts signed an exclusive publishing deal with the Star Wars camp. And so the Battlefront series was reborn at EA DICE, the studio behind Battlefield and the Frostbite engine. A decade after the release of Battlefront II (2005), a new generation of gamers would live out their grandest Empire Strikes Back fantasies in Star Wars Battlefront (2015). It was a good game at launch and a great one by the end of its brief life cycle, incorporating some of the all-time great Star Wars game modes in the form of its Rogue One and Death Star DLC packs. Its asymmetrical “Walker Assault” game type proved antithetical to competitive play, but it felt a lot like the 2004 Battlefront. Once again, you could simply be a grunt in the snow at the Battle of Hoth, lumbering durasteel giants drawing closer and closer to the rebel base till one side claimed victory.

The inevitable fourth installment, Star Wars Battlefront II (2017), came with a more polished multiplayer component, but the immediate selling point was its single-player story campaign — something the 2015 game had lacked entirely. One-third of the planned story, set around the time of The Force Awakens, shipped as a free download shortly after launch, but even the base campaign had a satisfying story to tell, with loads of connections to the novels and comics that had come out around 2015. Players take on the role of Imperial commando Iden Versio (who eventually defects to the Rebel Alliance), and some familiar faces show up along the way. I certainly didn’t expect to play as Luke Skywalker or Lando Calrissian going into the campaign, but this was seven years out from 2010’s The Force Unleashed II. Getting to wield a lightsaber for a bit was a welcome surprise.

Despite all the fun to be had, both of DICE’s Battlefront games suffered under EA’s controversial monetization practices at the time. The first game split most of its best maps and modes across a series of small paid expansions, so if you wanted to play everything your friends were enjoying, you needed to pony up for the season pass. It’s almost unthinkable now, but I paid $107.99 for the complete Ultimate Edition on Xbox nine years ago. The sequel’s progression system, however, was a quagmire of randomized loot boxes, pay-to-win advantages, and a level of grind users refused to accept. The worst of these were quickly removed from the game, but the studio continued to support the title with new locations, characters, and modes through the release of 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker. A story of failure became one of undeniable triumph, and to this day the game remains one of the best casual online shooters around.

It’s taken a long time for EA to earn back the faith of the Star Wars audience, but stellar games like Motive’s Squadrons and Respawn’s Jedi: Survivor seem to have done the trick. The Battlefront II (2017) debacle feels like ancient history, given all that’s happened in the industry at large in the intervening years. Will we ever see another Star Wars game on the scale of DICE’s Battlefront releases? This came up in a recent conversation I was having with a friend, over a few rounds of Helldivers II, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

On the one hand, it’s only a matter of time before we get something like a Battlefront equivalent. The disappointment over Aspyr’s so-so ports of the first two games, packaged as the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection, underscores the affection people still have for these two-decade-old gems. Meanwhile, the second elephant in the room is that EA just laid off 23 people at Respawn and canceled a first-person shooter inspired by The Mandalorian. Disney’s play amid all the recent mass layoffs and studio closures has been to announce that it’s investing $1.5 billion in Epic Games, the mega-publisher behind Fortnite.

The recent success of Helldivers II shows that live-service games can still thrive alongside the industry’s biggest “hobby games” but it’s expensive to ship a multiplayer Star Wars title with a blockbuster campaign mode attached to it. If we see another Battlefront pitch make it to market in the foreseeable future, it may be a very budget-conscious one. I’m reminded of the original Titanfall, which cleverly built its story campaign around an online-multiplayer framework; voice-over’s cheaper than a bunch of cinematic footage with voice-over on top of it. We’ve come to expect a lot of cutting-edge performance capture from Star Wars, but maybe that makes more sense in games like the Jedi series or Bethesda’s Indiana Jones.

So how could it work? Again, I go back to that image of the nameless freedom fighter with a blaster — one soul against an AT-AT or the blade of Kylo Ren. The response to Andor, and Rogue One before it, proves that a band of ordinary warriors can be every bit as inspiring as a Jedi Master. Playing as the bad guys, as we’ve established, has been done; the classic Battlefront II centered on the famed 501st Legion under Vader, and the most recent entry followed the Empire’s Inferno Squad. It seems to me it’s time to make the rebels cool again — a few flawed, believable characters trying to survive in a galaxy besieged by tyrants.

Variety’s part of what makes Battlefront so great, but consider Battlefield 1’s ingenious “War Stories” format: an anthology separate stories told through different viewpoints, different battlefields. Imagine playing as a prospector or treasure hunter who gets drawn into the conflict between the Jedi and the Nihil on Elphrona, a world we’ve only read about in books. Picture yourself as a clone trooper, or a farmer with a family, taking on a legion of droids on Dantooine at the height of the Clone Wars. Then on to Aldhani during the reign of the Empire, Chandrila under the New Republic, and Batuu as the First Order hunts the Resistance to the brink.

Rebellion can happen anywhere, at any time, as long as good people are willing to fight for what matters. A casual co-op shooter you can play with friends — perhaps a kind of anti-Helldivers, given the message of compassion at the heart of Lucas’s universe — sounds like another Battlefront worth playing.

Alex James Kane is the author of the Boss Fight Books entry on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. He has written for various publications, including Fangoria magazine, IGN, Polygon, RogerEbert.com, and Variety. He lives in west-central Illinois.