Name: Battlefield 1943 It was back in 2002 when I got my first real taste of a truly sandbox type war game. Battlefield 1942 was its name, a game that has stuck in any true PC gamers mind as being one of the leading games to open up a defining genre. A combination of air, ground and sea combat all rolled into one package made for a spectacular game. You had vehicles, aircraft, ships, submarines, not counting the gun emplacements either. Battlefield 1942 was a great game, and one we shall not forget.
So what is Battlefield 1943 I hear you wonder? They added a year on, and now you get jet fighters and rocket packs? Maybe not...
If you took the best bits from 1942, the air combat, the ground combat, the open world large maps, and team gameplay, then put it all together, on top of that, you then upgraded the graphics and used a new engine which allowed for destructible environments. You would get Battlefield 1943.
After playing the game for some considerable time, it really shows that a lot of work has gone into this new game in the Battlefield franchise. As a downloadable title, the game has been cut short of a full retail release. While we had so much in 1942, 1943 cuts back on certain parts of the classic game, removing the ships, most aircraft, some classes and a lot of the maps and game modes. While this could be looked at as a negative, the gameplay and price more than make up for the games lack of content.
Shipping with three maps, three classes and one multiplayer game mode – conquest, the classic game mode that pits your side against the opposite, fighting for capture points which enable you to conquest the map and stop the enemies’ ability to respawn.
For Battlefield 1942 veterans, 1943 should be a breeze in the park to get used to. Although it’s difficult to get used to the controls at first if you come from a mouse and keyboard background. The controls are intuitive and easily adaptable, however if you played Battlefield Bad Company then you should feel right at home since the controls are very similar. Anyone remembering how hard it was to land planes need not worry either since now it’s a walk in the park compared to the original 1942.
When I first got into the game, the thing that most stood out was the graphics. The original had the same maps, but with 1943 using the Frostbite engine from Battlefield Bad Company, the maps are a lot brighter with more foliage and generally more realistic but have also been made smaller.
The multiplayer mode supports up to a maximum of 24 players – 12 per side, so the maps have been made smaller to keep the action closer together and not have you at one side of the map wondering where the enemies are to battle it out with.
As I played through the tutorial which shows you the basics, what I liked about it was the fact that you could run through the tutorial within a matter of minutes. The controls were easy to use and I admit, I find it difficult to tear myself away from using a mouse and keyboard plus a joystick for flying, but it seemed easy enough to play.
After a minute or so, I was quickly ushered into a tank for some vehicle combat. Now the original game had the tanks feeling a little floaty, you could get up most obstacles with relevant ease but with 1943, the tanks have been given a much more solid and slow feel, sometimes they do feel a little underpowered, not being able to climb some fairly easy slopes. Once jumping in you go straight into first person view, and while it’s difficult to see what’s going on around you while looking down the barrel sight, you easily have the option to go into third person mode behind the tank, thus improving your field of view and giving you a better scope of where you’re going and how your tank is reacting to the environment. Having a tank and seeing obstacles everywhere, the urge to drive into something and blow it up took over, so with pedal to the metal, I simply drove through the corner of a nearby building, something you could never do in 1942. The times I have been camped outside a base trying to capture the point and an enemy has been inside knowing I can’t hurt them, it’s usually a case of frantically blasting through the windows trying to kill the evil camper so I can capture the point. Well, in 1943 you don’t have that problem. If he’s hiding inside, just blow the side of the building out. Viola, no more capture point campers!
Once I was acquainted with the hulking Sherman tank, I was given the chance to fly the Corsair pacific fighter plane. Jumping into the cockpit and realizing, this just gets better and better, with the press of a button I was rolling forward and taking off. You hardly need a runway for these things, the game has been given more of an “arcade” feel so as not to alienate new players, but this isn’t a bad thing at all, it makes it more of a pick up and play game without having to mess around with runways and landing. The aircraft don't travel as fast as in the original either, but this is mainly due to the smaller maps. The slower flying makes it easier to shoot your targets either in first or third person perspective.
After shooting down some targets, and randomly dropping bombs on anything I felt like blowing up, I went to land on an aircraft carrier, and with relative ease I was down and stationary. After landing on the aircraft carrier, facing towards the stationary planes waiting to be flown, I ran to the Japanese Zero knowing that from the original game, this was the plane to have. Highly manoeuvrable and fast to fly, I was hoping not to be let down and I certainly wasn’t. After checking my surroundings and looking at the plane and its upgraded graphics, my Corsair which I had gone and parked a small distance in front blew up so that it could respawn just like in the original 1942. Realizing if I went to take off, I would hit the burning molten wreckage of my Corsair I came to find that there was no reversing in a plane like you could in the original. While that's not the greatest thing to leave out in a game, it doesn’t help that you could simply park in front a plane with a tank for instance and cripple the enemies’ air force for a short while - hypothetically speaking of course.
Overall the game is very impressive for what it offers, with the limited gameplay modes, maps, vehicles and so forth, it remains to be seen whether or not Battlefield 1943 will be able to keep an audience satisfied for a reasonable amount of time. DICE have said that new maps may come in the form of additional download content after release, and Coral Sea which isn’t available from the start has to be unlocked through a community killing system so we are told.
Battlefield 1943, may be too little for those who played 1942 back in the day, but with its pick up gameplay and arcade style ease of use, it seems set to be a winner on the three platforms it’s due out for – PC, Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network.
