Palpatine lives on in this awesome Star Wars Battlefront 2 cosplay

One of the new characters we've seen in trailers for Star Wars Battlefront 2 has a familiar face: Emperor Palpatine's. Instead of the ol' hologram projector, in Battlefront 2 the Emperor's taken to having his face projected onto the body of a tall, imposing red-clothed messenger droid. It's a convenient way for his final orders to stick around post-Death Star explosion, but it's also a fun callback to the Emperor's elite royal guards, seen for about seven seconds in Return for the Jedi. As it turns out, the design also makes for a pretty amazing cosplay.

The crew over at Tested (including longtime PC Gamer writer Norman Chan) partnered up with EA for a sponsored costume build of the messenger droid, complete with a wrinkly Palpatine mask and gorgeous LED-lit helmet. The whole outfit looks like the spitting image of the messenger droid as seen in gameplay footage. Tested is promising a series of builds showing how builder Frank Ippolito created the costume, but for now you can see the messenger droid costume doing the rounds at New York Comic Con in the video above.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).