BF1942 SWoWWII is a "beer and pretzels" FPS that provides hours of WW2 themed fun for the casual gamer.
My review of BF1942/RTR/SW is based on a play through of both the Allied and Axis campaigns and playing all the remaining individual missions as both sides, not included in the campaigns, against AI bots. BF1942 missions are focused on capturing and/or defending objectives and have no single player character or narrative (apart from the mission briefing screen which gives you the setting). The missions, while overwhelmingly generic, do offer a good variety of weapons and vehicles, vessels, and aircraft to try and maps to explore. Make no mistake BF games are well loved by many FPS gamers, I just happen to prefer the similar Delta Force games which provide more structured mission objectives.
Like the other Battlefield titles, the campaigns and one off missions in BF1942 require you to attack enemy bases (flags) and defend friendly and captured bases (flags). There is no need to look deeper as that is all there is to the Battlefield games. You select the battle (or map), adjust the number of AI and its difficulty, pick your weapon's load out and spawn point and away you go. Simple, beer and pretzels stuff. Not bad, just not really fulfilling. That said, it is great FUN, though far from realistic for an infantryman, to jump on board and drive a tank and fire its main gun and MG or pilot a fighter plane. I preferred playing as one of the various infantrymen types or as a tank driver/gunner to flying aircraft.
While designed with a multiplayer focus, the single player game can provide hours of, dare one say, mindless FPS entertainment battling AI bots. BF1942 is BIG on entertainment, but small on reality. While numerous WWII era weapons, from small arms to tanks, aircraft and even ships, are represented there is a noticeable disconnect from reality. Weapons appear in game time terms ahistorically. It is unlikely that the physics of all weapons is realistically modelled, certainly not the sniper rifles. Again these quibbles should not bother most shooter afficionados, only the history and weapons purists. Certainly SW brings into play a number of weapons systems that saw limited or no real world use, but again BF1942 is all about FUN.
Gameplay is identical to BFV, which of course is the later game, or arguably a more detailed mod of BF1942. As a single player you can play a chronological 16 mission campaign as either the Allies (British, Russians and Americans) or Axis (Germans and Japanese) or choose an individual mission from those available. The missions provide a good representation of historical battles fought in North Africa, the Pacific, the Eastern Front and the Western Front. That said, the names of the missions may be historical but the missions themselves are more about giving the player a "feel" for the battle than representing actual events.
Once you have picked your mission or campaign, adjust the difficulty settings (by adjusting AI difficulty, ratio of enemy to friendly troops, CPU time allocated to AI, etc) and then pick your side, Allied or Axis. You will then be able to select your weapons load-out and spawn location. The weapons load-outs are fairly generic in vanilla BF1942 but can be quite varied in the various mods discussed later. Your basic weapons load-outs, known as troop kits, are: scout/sniper, assault, anti-tank, medic and engineer. Each troop kit has its own particular capabilities in addition to the weapons carried, for example the scout can spot artillery, the medic can heal wounds and the engineer lay mines or repair vehicles.
BF1942 has no in-game save system however health and ammunition can be replenished by first aid and ammunition crates usually located at spawn points or near defensive positions. Players can also change their weapons kits in-game by retrieving them from dead soldiers. Depending on the difficulty settings it is thus possible to play for an extended period by restoring health, ammunition and changing weapons before needing to respawn.
The battles/missions are won or lost depending on the relative number of friendly to enemy troops killed and/or positions captured.
The various troop kits can also be changed before each respawn so if you are being overwhelmed by enemy tanks then anti-tank (bazooka) or engineer (mines and explosive charges) are a good choice. The sniper troop kit is a personal favourite but once you fire your location is pretty much registered, so move away quickly as cover is not particularly effective in BF1942. One thing that drives realism downwards is the sheer number of enemy units that seem to arm themselves with rocket launchers, rather than the more prolific rifles or SMGs. Strange to see rocketlauncher armed infantry taking pot shots at each other. This also occurs in BFV, though seems less common in BF2. Anyway quibbles aside, players will have a vast array of weapons load-outs and vehicles to play with from from both the Axis and Allied sides of WWII.
Multiplayer gameplay and pre-play mechanics are essentially the same as that for single player and AI bots will round out the opposing teams. It should be noted that the MP option also provides maps not found in the SP missions. My son and I indulged in LAN based sniper duels amidst the swirling battles and this was quite fun.
The maps and the vehicles they are populated with are what make BF1942 stand out. Despite the somewhat dated graphics the level of detail in many of the maps is quite astounding. The later Battlefield titles certainly do a better job with vegetation and water effects but the game still holds up well almost 10 years on. Indeed I recently played Sniper Elite and the environment graphics in that had a similarly dated feel, however in both cases this does not detract from the enjoyment. The rolling sand dunes of the Libyan and Egyptian desert, the (not so dense) jungles of various Pacific islands and the ruined villages, towns and cities of Europe are all well evoked.
A plus is the players ability to play as part of the Axis forces something that is not possible in the story driven WWII FPS games like the MOH or COD series. That said, irrespective of which side you fight for the gameplay will not feel different but all the maps offer different challenges whether you are primarily defending or attacking the various control/spawn points.
BF1942 was officially expanded by the following add-ons (which are akin to the Special Forces, Euro Force, Armored Fury booster packs in BF2):
o The Road to Rome (RTR) is focussed on the amphibious landings and the subsequent long hard slog of the Italian Campaign and provides 6 new maps, a variety of new vehicles and weapons and adds the Free French and Italians. The RTR missions, in my experience, seemed more challenging and hence rewarding on the same AI settings than vanilla BF1942.
o Secret Weapons of WW2 (SW) is focussed on adding some of the conceptual and rare weapons systems that appeared (or may have appeared) in the final stages of the war in Europe, like futuristic jets and rocket packs. Also added are some new weapons and vehicles that were actually used, but not previously included in BF1942. SW provides 8 new missions/maps set in Europe usually around secret rocket or nuclear installations and adds Commandos and Elite troops. Alas neither RTR nor SW allows for the play of a full Allied or Axis campaign as does vanilla BF1942.
Like BFV, BF2, Delta Force Black Hawk Down/Team Sabre and Delta Force Xtreme, BF1942 is supported by a strong modding community. Like those games, it is often the mods that offer the more enjoyable experience rather than the vanilla game. A number of the mods originally made for BF1942 have also been remade for the more up to date BFV and BF2 games, of these Eve of Destruction, set in Vietnam, is highly recommended in either its BFV or BF2 incarnations. Two of the better developed and complete BF1942 mods that are worthy of mention, especially due to their greater focus on historical accuracy, are:
o Battlefield 1918 (v3.1, ~1.8GB from Mod DB) - uses the BF1942 engine to recreate famous battles from WWI, including battles away from the trenches of Western Front. Over 90 maps, many suitable for single player, are provided covering battles on all the European Fronts, the Middle East and the African colonies of the major powers. Weapons, uniforms and vehicles of the major and minor forces in WWI are provided, including Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire, Canada, Senegal and Australia.
o Battlefield 1942 Forgotten Hope (v0.7, ~2.1GB from Mod DB) - a more realistic, admittedly a relative term in the BF1942 universe, treatment of WWII battles with customized maps. Provides hundreds of new and variant weapons, vehicles, aircraft and vessels as well as updated and new skins and sound effects. Adds the 1939 Polish forces, as well as revised troop classes and weapon load-outs for officers, pilots and naval infantry. Forgotten Hope is also available in a highly regarded BF2 incarnation (currently v2.4 ) and has to a degree supplanted BF1942 as the Battlefield series' preferred WW2 system.
BF1942 is a reasonably stable game BUT it does suffer from a seemingly random and unexplained crash to desktop (CTD) problem. A search of the internet did not provide a fix for this problem and many theories abound but it appears to afflict a number of the Battlefield titles. For the record, uninstalling and re-installing the game or drivers makes no difference and a CTD can happen whether or not you apply the v1.6b patch (which I thought may have been the cause of the CTD problem). In my case, once it occurs it will keep re-occuring a few minutes after any mission is loaded. The solution in my case is to restart the PC and start no other application before playing BF1942 and it will then play fine, usually for several hours, before a CTD occurs again, if at all. A similar solution worked, in my case, in preventing random crashes and lock ups in The Saboteur. Although no error message or log is created when the CTD occurs I suspect the cause is a 3D graphics/GPU driver related issue and a simple PC restart may fix it (as in my case) rather than un-/re-installing drivers and/or BF1942.
OVERALL: BF1942 provides hours of fun on well detailed maps that are representative of the battles they portray. However without an intersting single player character, or storyline or interesting in-mission tasks you may be left feeling a bit empty afterwards. What players seem to like most is the ability to drive vehicles, fly planes and pilot ships. Well it can be fun, but the game can engender a feeling of bland sameness after a while. Each mission, or more appropriately map, while unique pretty much follows the same backwards and forwards capture, defend, and recapture dynamic. Still BF1942 remains a good time filler when you need a FPS fix and it'll keep your eye and trigger finger well tuned. Nowadays it is best to buy the BF1942 Anthology Edition, as I did, as you get all the bells and whistles.