Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Great multiplayer"

Anyone who is a real FPS fan knows about the battlefield series. Up until about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, EA had most of the market share in their award-winning series. There is a good reason behind the games' popularity: they are GOOD games. As the series has evolved, it has become more and more frenetic, more intense, and more advanced.

Battlefield 2142 isn't quite as much an advancement as Battlefield 2 was in terms of features added and graphics changes (in fact it uses the same graphics engine). It does, however feature a few nice innovations. One is the integrated friends list. You can now make and track your friends online without minimizing the game, and you can easily join their game in progress to provide them with needed reinforcements the moment you log on. The improvement that will be most appreciated by the more average computer hardware is the streamlined map loading screen. It takes about a fifth the time to load a map in 2142 as it did in BF2, but be aware it will still take a long time any time you make major changes to your video options, as BF:2142 will want to optimize your shaders each time such a change occurs. Another thing that has been overhauled is rank advancement, awards and unlocks. Medals and ribbons are no longer vanity achievements, but provide bonus experience points to help boost your rank. In addition, a new series of awards have been added called pins. Pins are earned any time you fulfill the requirements during a single match. For instance, you get a pin for killing 8 enemies with a shotgun or pistol in one match. You also get a pin for killing 5 enemies without dying. These pins, like medals and ribbons will award you with a sum of experience points. There are also many more ranks and many, many more unlocks. Although they technically reduced the number of weapons you can unlock, you now can unlock new equipment, gadgets and power-up-type enhancements. These unlocks are not all immediately available, but instead are unlocked in a hierarchical fashion. For example, if you are more of a spec ops veteran from Battlefield 2 and didn't dig sniper very much, you could choose to advance that side of the scout tree, unlocking rewards that are more appropriate to that play style, including a high rate-of-fire carbine, plastic explosives, and a personal active camouflage gadget. And for those who used to hate those paddle-spammers, you can rest easy. The defibrillator which allows you to revive teammates is now an unlock, so not every assault class you run in to may have it. It is also important to note that no class can use more than 2 gadgets at a time. Therefore, balance lies in players having to pick their gadgets carefully, as most of the unlockable gadgets do provide VERY important benefits. For example, your support class can unlock what is essentially an infantry-only UAV (with a much smaller radius of course). Even better is that this small gadget can be stuck to any surface you can throw it at, including moving vehicles! And in addition to class-specific unlocks, you can also unlock squad-leader unlocks. These are extremely important and helpful to your squad, such as the spawn beacon which can be placed on any flat surface (unfortunately this doesn't include vehicles) and essentially replaces your squad leader spawn with a static spawn point from which you can spawn, even if the squad leader dies.

Finally, we come to the Titan game mode. Essentially, each side has their very own flying battleship, complete with an aircraft hanger, air-to-surface turrets, and anti-air turrets. Instead of strategic points, each side attempts to control anti-titan missile silos and instead of having a limited number of tickets, your objective is to destroy the enemy's titan before they can destroy yours. The controlled missile silos will periodically launch a missile that will reduce the integrity of the titan's shields. They will also launch a missile the moment they change to a different side's control. Once the shields go down, the enemy is free to land on the titan and infiltrate its corridors to destroy control consoles and ultimately the titan core. The titan, being in the sky, is not easy to reach. The only ways an enemy can make it to your titan is launching from an APC that is within range or physically landing on it with an air transport. Theoretically, you could move the titans close enough together that you could launch from your own Titan's launch tubes to the other titan, but this situation is mutually detrimental to each side and thus almost never happens. The pacing isn't actually much different than conquest, but the maps are slightly smaller. The titans CAN be moved (albeit, very slowly) if your commander wishes to do so, but on most maps this is unnecessary or even puts your team at a disadvantage. Furthermore, standing and walking on a moving titan is glitchy at best, but some servers cannot even handle the load, causing severe, unplayable lag. But all in all, moving the titans is not important to the game mode, and the game mode itself is quite fun. The bottom line for Battlefield 2142 is that, it makes some important improvements on the Battlefield of today, and stand-alone it is quite a good game, which is why I rated it so. However, these innovations don't TRULY set it apart from Battlefield 2, which is why it does not merit a higher score.