Somebody once said, "war is hell". Well, sure, but give Battlefield 1942 a spin and your soon be doubting such words. War has never been so much fun, and I say that with my tongue firmly in my cheek.
Battlefield 1942 is an online FPS set in 1942, surprisingly. It has a small offline element, where you fight bots, which is fun but should really be seen as a form of "training" for the real thing, online play against other human beings. My first reaction to the battlefield was that of complete awe. The battles are so large scale! Tanks clash against tanks, planes swoop overhead, boats glide across the ocean and infantry infest the large maps terrain. The idea is to capture land and hold it. Each map has a set of flags that represent a checkpoint that must be taken over by either side. As each side gains flags their"ticket" points go up and down. If one side holds 5 out of 6 flags, the other side will lose it's ticket points fast. Once it hits 0 that team loses. These points represent the amount of reinforcements available for that team... the more flags you hold, the more you can keep re-spawning players and vehicles. This system really does create some great battles. One of my funniest experiences of this game was on the Omaha beach map once as allied. It was a 64 player server and the map started up, off us allies went on our landing craft to hit the beach whilst the axis lined up in their bunkers ready to chew us up. A nameless player kept insisting that some axis artillery was hitting the battleship our landing craft and us spawn from but we ignored him. We hit the beach, and were mown down by machine gun fire and snipers. We failed to take the beach head flag. But our battleship suddenly then blew up... it had been hit so much from the axis side it sunk! We could no longer spawn since we had no spawn point! Our boat had gone, the axis held the beach... all we could do was watch the axis team run down to the beach and dance around in joy as we pondered about in ghost mode. It was all over yet the map did not end... everyone got confused then we realised one allied player remained on the battlefield in the only remaining landing craft but he was a joker and had gone right to the edge of the map, way beyond the axis players draw distance, and was camping there, knowing everyone on the server relied on him to die. He stayed put smugly, and after 20 minutes he had managed to empty an entire 64 player server on a busy night!
Overview
The first thing you do in bf194 is select your side, axis or allied. Both sides have realistically depicted weaponry and vehicles such as the allied Sherman tank and the axis Panzer mk iv. You won't be finding any arcade style big guns here - that's not to say there are no "big" guns! In this game you can man fixed weapons such as artillery pieces on land and even the huge front guns of a battleship. This is not to mention the tanks, planes, and other vehicles you can drive. Maybe you would prefer to just stick to your feet as an infantryman, fine. You get to chose between 5 pre-defined classes each with their own weapon set. These are quite typical in their style, the assualt class with its light maching gun, the sniper with sniper rifle, your medic class, anti-tank class, and my favourite, the engineer. What makes the engineer so fun is the ability to lay mines and TNT as well as being able to repair vehicles. Setting a line of mines along a road along with a stick of dynamite only to then see a player looking cool in his German Tiger Tank is beyond satisfying. Along comes the tiger... bang! Fireworks, you detonate your bomb, the mines react and all blow up, you have yourself one very dead tank crew. You will find yourself fighting in so many varied battles in this game, from the beaches of Omaha on D - Day, to the slopes and ridges of Iwo Jima in the Pacific. Almost every major World War 2 battle is in this game, and EA are still bringing out new maps with every patch!
There is no blood in bf194, and the damage modelling is not particularly realistic. It is not horribly unreal though, it is aimed at being fun, and in my view works very well at capturing the realism without seeming like some sort of simulation. 3-4 shots will kill, and a headshot will kill in one hit, so sniping is very HS orientated and is generally alot harder than in most games but once you get good sniping really pays off in this game.
Battles can consist of anything up to 64 players! And EA really have gone out of their way to get this game fantastic server support. Virtually every server is a dedicated official EA one, hosting 64 player battles. The in-game browser is pretty neat with a good filter system and the ability to add favourites (something many games forget). You really don't need to use Gamespy or the All-seeing eye here, it's that good. The other factor here is that of the old chestnut, lag, and I can tell you now that this game has some of the best netcode I have ever seen. Even on a 64 player server the average ping will be 15-50 for most players and lag really never seems to be an issue on the official EA servers. This really is a marvellous achievement, brilliant server support alongside a game with an exceptional netcode which gets better with every patch!
Graphics and Sound
Battlefield 1942 uses the Refractor 2 graphics engine in order to create large and detailed maps. This engine is very nice indeed. I find the colour of the terrain in this game very lush and rich, more so than most. Player models are very detailed, right down to their facial reactions to the situation. Player models will look frightened in big gunfights and smile with delight after getting a kill, it is truly impressive. Textures themselves are not the most detailed out there but look good enough. The palm trees sway in the wind, the sun light glitters down across the oceans... there is nothing wrong with the graphics in this game.
Sound is often taken for granted in games. As long as people can hear the game they are happy, well not me! I am just as concerned over sound in games as I am over it's visuals. I have a 5.1 speaker set up and trust me, once you played games in 5.1 or 6.1 there is no turning back, it's just too damn good. Bf1942 has good sound, the music is cheesy and I turned it off quickly, but the sound effects themselves are of high quality. Explosions go off in the distance and a few seconds later you hear the delayed "pop" of them as the sound reaches you. The ambient sounds really create an atmosphere. You become tense as you hear the faintest of sounds... could that have been an incoming aircraft I just heard? The sound does have issues though, you get a horrible "crackle" effect sometimes which sounds terrible and happens randomly. This tends to link with people using more than two speakers, but it is an annoyance that does not happen for me in other games.
Conclusions
At the end of the day the only thing that truly matters when it comes to a game is it's gameplay. Does it play well? In the case of Battlefield 1942 I would say yes it plays well. It plays so damn well you could compare it to a really enthusiastic penguin who wants to fly and eventually builds a glider. It has issues, one being the fact that it is a demanding game and requires a high spec pc to run well, and the fact remains that it is hardly a game of any depth. But so what? It's fun, it's playable, that's the main thing. It could do with more weapons for sure, and blood would be nice, although there are some blood mods available out there free for download which are pretty good. The modding community for this game is alive and already we have seen some nice mods - the most popular being Desert Combat: US Army versus Iraq in modern setting with modern equiptment/vehicles. They are a laugh, but i prefer the world war 2 setting myself.
Battlefield 1942 is not for everyone. It is a FPS based on taking checkpoints, holding ground, and not based on a team deathmatch setting. This may not appeal to some since it does mean that the emphasis is on the checkpoints, or flags, and not just all out battle. For me, this is a good thing. It means that teams must act as a group and use teamwork becuase if they don't and instead all rush to get the kills the enemy will grab the flags and win quickly.
I have gripes with the game such as the way standard hand grenades seem to do so much damage to tanks when they should do very little, but these are minor. Battlefield 1942 is a fine game worthy of merit. It is not only a playable game, it's a technological achievement.
Summary
Pros
Huge battles, great graphics, fun, addictive, easy to pick up
Cons
Requires a high system spec, could do with more weapons to select from, tanks seem too weak for what they are.
9.0/10
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