Battlefield 1942 Review

On the strength of the demo alone, anybody here at IGN would have to name Battlefield 1942 as one of the most enjoyable games we've played so far this year. Some of us would even say it's one of the most enjoyable games we've played in any year. As Ivan pointed out in his first impressions piece last week, it's gratifying to see so many people who normally just lounge on the fringe of PC gaming become so passionate about this game. But while the fun of the multiplayer sessions has us effectively chained to our desks pleading for "just one more match," the single player game leaves much to be desired.

For those of you who don't know, Battlefield 1942 is the latest game from DICE and EA and one that we haven't been able to stop playing. Equal partsTribes and Medal of Honor, Battlefield 1942 is a team-oriented shooter that puts the emphasis on action and puts the action in the various theaters of World War 2. Spread across the four main theaters of the War, the game lets you join up with one of the five major combatants -- the Americans, British, Germans, Russians and Japanese.

Each theater has four missions pitting a pair of opponents against each other. Your team is tasked with occupying and defending a few flag points located on each map. The teams each start with a certain number of tickets (which is apparently what they called "points" back in the forties). By holding a certain percentage of flags, you can force your opponents' tickets to decrease. Once a team's tickets reach zero, they loose.

Various player kits and vehicles let you dictate the role you'll play in the coming battle. At each team's base of operations (and many of the smaller bases gathered around the flags), there can be a number of tanks, planes or ships that you can jump in and pilot. Some maps even place a given team in the midst of a flotilla of ships that can be driven and commanded by players.

It's this freedom to jump in and out of roles in the midst of battle and adapt to the ebb and flow of the battle that makes Battlefield 1942 so accessible. The somewhat sim-heavy aspects of games like World War 2 Online orOperation Flashpoint are done away with here in favor of a more elemental (some would say generic) control system. While the Shermans are distinct from the Panzers in terms of performance, the basics of their operation are exactly the same.

Battlefield 1942 also benefits from a relaxed yet sensible spawn system. Players can respawn at any flag controlled by their own team. But the spawns come in windows so you may find yourself sitting out of the action for anywhere from a few seconds to half a minute. Respawning also deletes your team's tickets thereby making constant suicide attacks ultimately self-defeating.

This constant but controlled spawning makes the game seem larger than it is. With a group of ten or twelve soldiers on a side, the action expands toseem like part of a much larger battle. You get a real sense of waves of opponents coming at you, but the fact that each new wave is composed of guys killed in the last one, gives the game an intimacy and familiarity that puts a face and name on the conflict. It works much the same for your own teammates as you join up with small squads and take the fight to the enemy.

For me the best parts of HALO or Medal of Honor were when you found yourself side by side with friendly soldiers. The sense of teamwork and opportunity for cooperation added immeasurably to both games. Battlefield 1942 is full of exactly this kind of enjoyment. Thankfully the effectiveness of individual players isn't hampered by the team-based format. Since a single soldier can take a flag, a single soldier can win the war. I think this practically eliminates the need for an extra player to direct the action in some sort of traditional RTS format. Part of the fun is in being free to do what you want to do while also realizing that your best bet is to stick close to your teammates and work towards a common goal.

Individuals will also find that, despite the strengths and weaknesses of the classes, there's a way to stay competitive in all but the most hopeless of circumstances. Scouts keep enemies at a distance, picking them off with sniper fire and calling in artillery strikes. Medics heal friendly soldiers (and themselves) while engineers can repair vehicles and place demolitions. While the basic anti-infantry and anti-tank kits, equipped with either a machine gun or bazooka, provide the bulk of your forces, the other three specialties can be just as influential in turning the tide of a battle. And since you can jump from one specialty to another between spawning, you can change your role if you don't like it.

We expected that the title would live or die purely on the strength of multiplayer, but we were still a bit taken back that the offline single player campaign is so unrewarding. Even if it wasn't overshadowed by the game's stellar multiplayer offerings, the single player game stands in need of drastic improvement before it can begin to draw players away from the current crop of shooters. Given the team-oriented focus, you'd need strong tactical and strategic AIs. The bots in single player seem oblivious to your needs, frequently speeding away as you call for pick-ups. Or, as in a few cases we've seen, simply sitting in the driver seat in the face of a visible and immediate danger.

Worse yet, the amount of PC power required to think for these poor slobs is too high. It's the first instance I can recall of a game that runs worse offline than it does online. The game lags so badly in single-player mode that we've almost all since given up on it and resigned ourselves to online only matches. Still, jerks that we are, we'd have faulted EA for omitting some sort of single player experience, no matter how rudimentary, so the fact that it is included at least gives them some credit.

The single player campaign does have one particular use that's missing from the multiplayer version in placing the battles in a linked and historical context. From Battleaxe to Berlin, the game presents each of the levels with a nice overview map that shows the starting positions and explains the background of the mission and where it stands in terms of the war as a whole. Given the lack of enjoyment in the single player campaign, these mini-briefings should also be part of the lengthy multiplayer loading screen. And when you consider that most gamers will play through the first few single player missions before giving up on it, it's a shame that the little historical notes won't be seen by as many people.

Each of the four theaters represents the conflict between two teams. The Germans have the worst of it, facing the Americans in Western Europe, the British in Africa and the Russians in the East. The Americans pull double duty in fending off the Japanese in the Pacific theater. Apart from the unique pairings and overall geography, a general philosophy of design holds together the four maps for each theater.

On the Pacific maps, you'll find small islands surround by powerful warships. Planes zip by overhead searching for the enemy navy while infantry must sail through the gauntlet of coastal batteries before fighting along the beaches. In North Africa armor is the name of the game as players race to gain control of various bases spread out in the vast desert between the two armies. The Western Front funnels the action through bridge crossings and breaks up the rural landscape with the odd town or two. The Eastern Front, while it has it's share of rustic type maps, takes the urban fighting a new level as the players fight from house to house in bombed-out cities.

The range of battles is excellent. In fact, despite the game's title, only six of the battles come from 1942. Right now, there's not a complete consensus on the popularity of the maps. Tobruk and the Bulge seemed really popular choices when we were playing this weekend. In the first map, the Germans have to push their tanks across a broad desert and smash through an English-controlled town. The Bulge features American and German bases at either end of a long river. As in most American-German setups, bridges play a big role in the fight.

Around here we like the street fights of Berlin and Stalingrad. Walking around a shell of a building and coming face to face with three enemy soldiers is a thrill that's hard to beat. Now imagine gunning down two of them and running into a nearby house to escape the third. Racing up to the fourth floor, you find a refuge that's hard to abandon, especially considering how wounded you are. Storming the high hills of Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima is yet another brand of fun.

But as great as straight conquest can be, the game could definitely benefit from some of the specific objectives that gave Return to Castle Wolfensteinsuch flavor. The war itself offers up a host of interesting possibilities ranging from blowing bridges to rescuing POWs to protecting convoys yet the game seems to focus almost exclusively on capturing and holding spawn points. A few more specific objectives would definitely make for better variation, but the levels themselves switch things up enough just in terms of geography.

The next generation of first-person shooters will definitely raise the bar for the genre (and for gaming in general) and while Battlefield 1942 can't compete with the photo-realistic visual style of Doom III, it still includes some truly remarkable details, especially considering the size and view distances of the levels and the variety of objects and environments simulated. The vehicles, levels and character models are definitely on par with Medal of Honor and contain some details that are only visible at very short distances.

The design team is also to be commended for making the various vehicles and characters identifiable at a distance. While the distinctions are clear enough in terms of the shape of objects, the use of color makes it a helluva lot easier. The Germans uniforms and vehicles are dark grey, while those of the Japanese are yellow. The system of player tags lets you know who's on your team and who isn't but at really far distances, it really helps to know whether to shoot at the yellow things or the light grey things.

The static skybox doesn't allow for any changes during the missions, but the variation between the skies and the times of day supports the existing visual distinction between the levels. The Pacific maps abound in palm trees and lots of lush undergrowth while the desert maps are littered with scrub and brown rocks. The architectural styles of the urban settings in the two European theaters are equally well defined with no noticeable doubling of buildings.

Effects are also damn impressive with trails lingering behind your bazooka shots and black smoke pouring from the engine of your recently crashed jeep. Explosions have a real sense of force behind them, which you can't help but notice as you're lobbing shells at an enemy tank. On the subject of vehicles, the scale's also really great. When you launch an LCV off a battleship, take a second and look up at the floating fortress that's behind you. It dwarfs nearly everything else in the game. Likewise, the differences in size between the large B-17s and the nimble P-51s reveal that the art team has a tremendous eye for detail.

The game's performance seems hit or miss for some folks. For the lucky gamers whose systems exceed the recommended spec, the game runs quite well. We were surprised though that the game runs at an acceptable level even on the minimum spec, at least in multiplayer. I ran the game on a P500 with a GeForce 2 without too much frustration. The Battlefield 1942 guys have wisely included a list of ways to improve the game's performance (most of which should be obvious) and, after taking their suggestions we saw playable framerates at 800x600 in 16-bit color.

The straight answer is that you can expect the game to run somewhat better than the demo. A 32MB video card is a realistic minimum requirement but you'll need RAM and a speedy and stable online connection to really enjoy the game.

But though multiplayer is the saving grace of the title, there are still a few weak spots. The more traditional multiplayer modes (such as capture the flag or straight out team-based deathmatching) just aren't as compelling as conquest mode. Like many others before them, EA's claimed that their game supports 64 players. And like others before them, they've fallen short of that goal. 32 seems a much more reasonable limit (as it did with Tribes 2 which made similar claims).

But the model of the game is solid enough to work with virtually any number of players. I've joined servers in a three-on-three fight only to have the teams grow to ten or twelve players each. While playing in both environments requires a small shift in approach, the fundamentals of the game are the same. And since most of the maps have multiple flags, 3-on-3 can be just as fluid and violent as a 12-on-12 match.

eamwork is also boosted quite a bit with improved communication.Battlefield 1942 uses two forms of communication, one passive and one active. On the passive side, a voice will chime in to reward you (or your teammates) for taking objectives. This, along with the minimap, can help orient you to the ebb and flow of the action. If you want to take a little more charge of things, you can broadcast canned radio messages to your team by using the F keys. It takes a while to familiarize yourself with the various commands available (enemy armor spotted, attack north base, etc.) but since the icons are all (by default) at the top of the screen, you can reference them during the game with little trouble.

The Verdict

There are two groups of people who won't like this game. The first are the unfortunate few who simply don't have a powerful enough machine or a fast enough connection to be competitive. The other group would be the misguided minority who just don't like fun.
The game is a perfect bet for fans of online action. It's even likely that this game will find converts in the RPG or strategy crowd. Hell, we even have the editors of the console sites joining in with us on a regular basis. We play nearly every multiplayer game that comes out here at work and nothing, not even Warcraft III has pulled in the kinds of crowds we're getting here at work.
For those who are looking for an excellent single-player experience that approximates what you can find in Battlefield, you're out of luck. There isn't one. Westwood's Renegade comes close in terms of intent but Medal of Honor comes closest in terms of feel and design. It just lacks the flexibility to and terrain to really simulate a battle.