Battlefied 1943 Review
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Battlefied 1943 Review
Battlefield 1943 is an online-only downloadable first-person-shooter
game for PS3 and Xbox 360, it’s been confirmed for a PC port, but it looks like
it’s been since cancelled. As a budget title, it’s aimed mainly at those who
find Bad Company 2 a little too expensive, want a cheap first experience of
Battlefield online, it’s in fact my first Battlefield, or just want to have
some cheap and cheerful online first-person fun. It’s got some stiff competition
with the likes of WarHawk and Team Fortress 2, but is it worth your money?
PRESENTATION
In terms of graphics and sound, Battlefield 1943 is a
pleasant surprise for a budget game. The character models leave a bit to be
desired, but there’s plenty else on offer. The foliage in the pacific-themed
maps is very detailed, the destruction in the environment is quite breathtaking
as bits of debris fly around, explosions look great and colours are
vibrant…until you get shot. There is a severe lack of music, barring the main
theme and the faint radio when driving a car, but the sound effects are genius.
Guns sound authentic and really feel like you’re dealing some damage, air raids
and falling bombs sound menacing, the explosions sound exciting and the way
audio fades when you’re near to an explosion for a few seconds after you hear
your ears pop is a nice touch. Add to this some sparse but decent American and
Japanese voices, and you have a game that really creates an exciting warzone
atmosphere.
CONCEPT (I no longer do 'concept' as part of reviews, it's part of Gameplay now)
The game objective is quite simple – you play as either the
U.S. Marine Corps or the Imperial Japanese Navy, and go at it in a mix of team
deathmatch and command point capture, or ‘conquest’. Each team has a set amount
of point displayed at the top of the screen with 2 bars. Deaths reduce these
points but to really propel your team to victory, you need to capture command
points. There are 5 of these on each map, which you can capture by standing
near to it until your flag is raised, and you can use it as a spawn point.
Holding 3 of them makes the other team’s points gradually decrease, holding
more makes it go down faster. When one team’s points hits zero, they lose and
it’s onto the next match.
Instead of picking your own weapon loadout, before you spawn
you pick from 3 different classes – the rifleman with his mid-range rifle and
grenades tailored for taking out infantry and minor demolitions. The
infantryman has a short range SMG for making mincemeat of the enemy at close
quarters, grenades, a wrench for repairing vehicles and gun emplacements, and
missile launcher for long-range destruction, best used against tanks. Finally,
there’s the scout, with his sniper rifle, sidearm pistol and dynamite bundles
for traps and heavy demolition. Each class also has a melee weapon, but barring
the infantry’s wrench they’re pretty much the same. The classes are pretty
well-balanced for the most part, but the rifle is a tad too powerful and SMG a
bit weak, but you’ll still want to swap between each of the classes quite
frequently.
On top of this, mounted machineguns and anti-aircraft guns
dot the battlefield and 4 vehicles help inject some variety. Boats act as troop
transports to get infantry from the aircraft carrier to the battleground, cars
help you and up to 2 allies zip from A to B, tanks act as mobile fortresses and
cut a swatch of destruction, and airplanes rain death from above and act as
great one-man transports. Oh, and is a parachute a vehicle too?
There are three maps for the main game – the
horseshoe-shaped Wake Island with plenty of flat plains
and open roads, the hilly Guadalcanal with vantage
points and low claustrophobic roads, and Iwo-Jima, a wide open battlefield with
2 main bases and a lighthouse in the middle. Sadly, even though the maps do
offer something different from each other, but a few sparse villages aside
there’s nothing that really feels like urban warfare. It leans towards open
battlegrounds a little too much.
GAMEPLAY
It all sounds dandy and fine on paper, but how does it play?
1943 retains the gameplay elements that make Battlefield games what they are –
highly destructible environments, vehicles, leading your target when sniping
and momentum and gravity affecting projectiles like missiles, bombs, rifle
grenades and mortars. You can also join a squad of up to 4 people, and if a
member of your squad is on foot or in a vehicle with a spare seat, you can
spawn right next to them. You’re given a lot of freedom to do what you want.
You can defend a capture point, go around in a plane, head to enemy capture
points, snipe, hop on a mounted gun, or call in an airstrike to dish out some
widespread destruction. The sheer amount of opportunities and options will
ensure you rarely play the same game twice and with up to 12 players on each
team, usually with servers full to the brim, it’s pretty much always a hectic,
intense blast of fun.
Connecting to a game can sometimes be a lot of trouble, and
playing the tutorial can fix this bug sometimes, but connecting to the servers
could still be a lot better. Once you’re in a game though, lag is more or less
kept to a minimum, or just makes the game unplayable. Most of the time, I
didn’t have any lag, even on my cheap internet, but apparently the 360 version
is more prone to lag.
There are a few problems. There’s the occasional glitch and
at the end of the day there’s only 3 maps in the standard game. This normally
wouldn’t be an issue, but most of the time once you play a match, the next
match will be on the same map with the players switching teams, and the teams
are more or less the exact same, barring the performance of their planes. It
would have been much more entertaining if the servers just cycled between the
maps. Even though there’s many different paths a battle can take, this can make
the game seem a bit repetitive at times, and the best method to counter this
really is just to only play a few matches a day. The real issue is the game’s
community. Most of the time there isn’t much teamwork going on, with people
racing each other to get to vehicles, taking off without offering people
passenger seats, not many people use the squads function or microphones, and
ingame communication is limited to telling your squadmates to attack a certain
capture point. Which is a shame when you want to get someone’s attention or
give advice. The real kicker is that the directional buttons aren’t used, and
the developers could have used them for communication commands like ‘follow me’
or ‘vehicle incoming’ and so on.
LIFESPAN
Ultimately it comes down to how long you’ll play it. Some
may get bored of it quickly, others will want to go for all the PS3 trophies or
360 achievements, some may gun for the highest rank, or even collect all the
ingame stamps to mark their accomplishments, and some people just never get
bored of it. The online community is still going strong after the release of
Bad Company 2 and looks like it’ll be like that for a good while to come, at
least on PS3. There’s also air superiority – a team deathmatch mode with
aeroplanes that helps to increase the game’s lifespan.
VERDICT
Battlefield 1943 lacks the content of other first-person
shooters on the market, but what’s there it usually does remarkably well. It’s
a case of quality over quantity and at a budget price it’s certainly worth
trying the free half-hour trial. Not as fully-fledged as Bad Company, but what
it offers is a highly entertaining dose of online action.
8.5 / 10 (my scores go in increments of 0.5 so it's out of 20, but I just prefer a 1 - 10 scale.)
Mental_Gear- Newb Gamer
- Posts : 55
Join date : 2010-04-25
Re: Battlefied 1943 Review
Awesome...and very long.
NoelX2- Forum Regular
- Posts : 390
Join date : 2010-03-29
Re: Battlefied 1943 Review
Yeah, I try to inform. Just my own preference. Makes it a little less exciting but I prefer to write in-depth ones.
Mental_Gear- Newb Gamer
- Posts : 55
Join date : 2010-04-25
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