Well, here’s something cool. A group of dedicated fans have done some incredible work and revived the Xbox 360 technical beta for the never-released Star Wars Battlefront III “predecessor,” Star Wars: First Assault. And it looks pretty cool!
As reported by Time Extension, a group of Star Wars fans has been able to resurrect Star Wars: First Assault and make it playable on PC, complete with online multiplayer support. Getting it to run on your PC isn’t the easiest thing in the world and involves a special version of Xbox 360 emulator Xenia, but the end result is a somewhat unstable look at a Star Wars game we never got.
Here’s 60+ minutes of gameplay footage of First Assault running on PC.
We first learned about Star Wars: First Assault all the way back in 2012 via a leaked Xbox Live Arcade listing. In 2013, Kotaku reported that First Assault was planned to be a downloadable multiplayer-only FPS that would support up to 16 players and would feature Rebels and Stormtroopers. According to one source close to the project, the plan back then was for First Assault to act as a sort of “step zero” to eventually produce and launch a full Star Wars: Battlefront III. The idea being that if First Assault sold well, it would pave the way for a full Battlefront sequel. None of that happened.
In 2013, a year after buying Lucasfilm, Disney shut down LucasArts and canned two different Star Wars games: Star Wars 1313 and First Assault. Over the last decade-plus, Battlefront has been revived by EA and Dice, though it seems highly unlikely we’ll get another EA-published Battlefront game anytime soon. In 2024, EA also canned a planned Star Wars shooter from Titanfall devs Respawn. That’s all a shame, but hey, at least you can check out First Assault now on your PC if you long for a “new” Star Wars FPS.