Developer: DICE
Publisher: EA
Release Date: Jul 8th 2009
Genre: 1st Person Shooter
I decided to sit on the review for a while, because, as many of you will be aware, there have been a few teething problems with Battlefield 1943.
Dice, EA or both were a little shy in their estimate of just how popular a new Battlefield game would be on release. From the Wednesday it was released, right through until Saturday, XBox360 owners were met with some difficulty in both getting into a game, getting into a game without massive lag, or partying up with friends.
It was a busy time for their official forums, and Dice even kept regular, often hourly updates on their twitter page, to keep customers who were hungry for some WW2 action up to speed on when they could expect more servers to go live.
By Saturday, I found most problems were fixed, and I was able to properly sample the game. By Tuesday, despite all the problems, XBox360 users found that the much awaited 4th map, unlocked after 43 million community kills, had already been unlocked, over a week less than was expected (done within a week on XBox Live, and within two weeks on PSN!).
Little does he know that I've lined the only ladder to this guard tower with TNT and am waiting in the bushes with the detonator!
So what is it all about? Well, I never got into the other Battlefield games, as I had somewhat gone off trying to keep up with PC gaming in the early 00s. I did pick up Bad Company, released last year, and found it not without it's share of errors, but also there was a lot of fun to be had with it's funky terrain/building destruction/class based multiplayer.
So the developers Dice wondered what it would be like to remake some maps from the original Battlefield game, 1942, using the new Bad Company Frostbite engine. The game and three maps would be released as downloadable only, XBox Live and Playstation Network content, with the fouth map/mode being unlocked with the 43 million community kills.
DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA DAKKKA!
The game is a sort of slimmed down Battlefield, with only 3 classes to choose from, and with no character / weapon customization that previous games have featured. The infantryman is your standard machine gun, close range guy, with a tank busting rocket, and handy grenades for backup. He also whip out a wrench for bludgeoning enemy soldiers or healing friendly tanks. I suppose that makes the infantryman a cross between the infantry / engineer classes.
The rifleman has a semi automatic M1 Garand, with some sweet reloading sounds! He get's a slightly-weaker-than-rocket-launcher grenade launcher, but it'll take a few of those to take a tank down. Again, he get's grenades, and his melee weapon is simply the bayonet on his rifle. The semi auto fire gives the rifle good medium range accuracy.
Lastly we have the scout, or sniper. There's the obvious long range advantage, but for closer foes, he gets a pistol, and his melee weapon is a big knife, or if you're playing as the Japanese, a badass katana. For explosives, he gets thrown sticky dynamite, which can be detonated remotely with a plunger.
Mayhem is frequent in this game.
There's a nice assortment of vehicles on offer, cars, jeeps, tanks, boats and fighter planes help mix up the combat a good deal, and there are various gun emplacements scattered about each level. These are, in typical Battlefield fashion, not all that easy to control, and you'll want to get a good setup for each vehicle type, which can be done in the options. There's also a tutorial mode, which lets you mess about in an empty map to get used to the vehicles. This is no Halo, so to get good with the likes of planes and tanks, you'll need a good bit of practice.
Tanks have a capcom-boss style weakspot on the rear!
Speaking of controls, there are a good few instances where I found them a little fiddly, perhaps because I'm too used to Halo/Call of Duty style configurations. But having become accustomed to Battlefield 1943, I can tell you that you do get used to them.
Landing a killer plane bomb takes a lot of practice to get the timing right, better to just Kamikaze someone!
The initial 3 maps are played in the typical Battlefield flag style. 5 bases are located about the map and if you stand near an uncontested flag, you capture that base, and your team may then spawn from it. If an enemy has a base, you must wait and deplete their 'control' before taking back the flag. Each team has a limited number of respawns (or 'tickets'), and when they run out it's all over. Therefore, the more bases you own, the more chance you have of pinning down the enemy and depleting their tickets.
So it's a fairly simple setup, there
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