Battlefield 1942 is standing tall lately. Massive FPS battles plus vehicles makes for a lot of fun, despite the team-killing jerks that seem to infest BF1942 servers lately. Simple formulae lend themselves to imitation, and Pandemic is offering up some of that sincerest form of flattery with Star Wars Battlefront.

It's a formula that worked admirably for Factor 5 in the series. Put the player in the role of a combatant in the famous battles of the Star Wars series. Players will get to play troopers, pilots, or specialists in battles on Hoth, Endor, Geonosis, and other planets, fighting on behalf of the Republic, the Seperatists, the Empire, or the Rebels. (Third-person and first-person mode can be switched on the fly; players will control a single soldier, 16 to a side on the Xbox and PS2, 32 to a side on the PC.) If there's an AT-ST, snowspeeder, speeder bike, or droid tank laying around unmanned (or undroided), players will be able to take the wheel, blasting or running over foes as necessary. There will even be a space battle, with a fighter or cloud car for every player, in the clouds of Bespin. (Hopefully the aircraft-obsessed spawnkillers that infest Battlefield 1942 will gravitate to servers running this planet.) All of the battles will be Seperatists vs. Republic or Empire vs. Rebellion, each on planets from the corresponding movies.

The variety of classes will be one interesting aspect; every faction will have four basic classes, and two specialists. Basic classes will include troopers, with blaster rifles and grenades, assault troops, with rocket launchers and mines, snipers, with sniper rifles (duh), and pilots, with repair kits and special piloting abilities. The specialized classes will vary by faction, and include Tribes-style jump pack troopers, medics, and even hard-to-control but heavily-armed destroyer droids.

While that describes the basic game neatly, the multiplayer campaigns are jewels of tantalizing possibility. LucasArts promises that each platform will have a campaign, taking into account the result of every battle. Each faction will be able to take control of different planets, with different effects. If the Republic controls Kamino, for example, their ranks will swell with recruits, allowing them some extra troops in each battle. Controlling Tatooine will grant the Rebels the ability to call in Luke Skywalker to cut a swathe through the Imperial ranks. And controlling Endor...well, that gives the Imperials access to the Death Star, and the ability to blow up other planets.

One slightly unhappy announcement is the segregation of the online modes. The Xbox version, played over Xbox Live, will be seperate from the other versions, as Live is a closed system. The PlayStation 2 and PC versions will both be hosted on GameSpy, but will be seperate from each other to prevent the inherent imbalance from different hardware and control schemes. Players will be able to host either PC and PS2 games on their own PC servers, but PS2 and PC players won't be able to play on the same servers.

Pitched battles. Rebels versus stormtroopers. Clone troopers blasting battle droids. It is any true Star Wars fanboy's (or fangirl's) dream, and Pandemic is on the way to making it possible, coming this September to the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PC. If the final game shows all the promise of this demo, gamers will be battling it out on the bloodied fields of a galaxy far, far away.