Imagine my surprise when EA did not release Battlefield 1943!
User Rating: 8.3 | Battlefield 1942 PC
I know most of you have some fond memories of little green soldiers with which you re-enacted some nameless (but personal) conflict that inevitably ends up in a disarray of plastic nightmare. What I’m trying to get to is to draw a comparison and tell you that playing Battlefield will be as closest as you could get in reliving the carefree days of mashing plastic figurines if not actually doing it for real and getting suspicious stares. No, Army Men games cannot cut it. If you want to feel like you have been a part of the conflict, and experience a prolonged war of attrition where cooperation and personal valour are in equal parts necessary, then you would have to give Battlefield 1942 a try. Battlefield 1942 is a game that allows you to participate in scenarios that made that particular chapter of the World War II the most frenzied and violent. These scenarios span three continents, located across different terrains including snow, grassland, desert, and tropical, sometimes dotted with strategic buildings or the destroyed remnants of them. The game also features five nations (US, Britain, Germany, Japan, and Russia) vying for supremacy, although an argument could be made that the differences between the factions remain rooted in aesthetics and a slight tinkering of their equipment counterparts. Another argument could be made as a observation that Italians were not included and that Britain could have been denoted as commonwealth. But then, it is really a moot point, since DICE beat even the RTS quota of factions in designing a FPS game. And it could have been probably for the best, since the task of balancing out all the innumerable factors governing all sets of weapons and their uses would have been impossible. Only two of the nations participate in a single scenario against each other (as in Axis & Allies), so the glaring sameness is at least minimized to a degree that you would not notice during unfolding action. There are sixteen maps in total packaged in the box, and although from the outset they seem paltry compared to other multiplayer shooters, these maps make up for its numbers in their sheer size or the impression thereof; rolling hills that stretch out as far as your vision can fathom, the sky that deceptively hides its ceiling, the depth of water that only the dead would reach. This size can accommodate up to 64 players in a single session. I wouldn’t be surprised if Battlefield 1942 was built from a flight simulator. Located among the maps are certain important landmarks that also conspicuously double as spawn points and weapons depot. The control of these spawn points are essential to build up points, of which when depleted to zero means defeat. The control of the points require at least one unit to be stationed within a certain set amount of time, which is negated with the presence of the enemy, and accelerated with the accompaniment of an ally. At the start of a match, the spawn points with the exception of the default starting locations are neutral. In a surprisingly touch lending more functionality to air units, they can hover over the points to take them. It is a system that depicts the momentum of war supported by resource points well, as the control of more spawn points lead to more opportunity to use additional means to take the war to the enemy, where there is still the possibility of a breakthrough and another tide of the battle. During the gameplay, the player would be able to choose from five classes that feature unique abilities that are further emphasized by their weapons load out. For example, the engineer class gets only a single action bolt rifle as a primary weapon, but is able to fix vehicles, set charges, and lay mines. The scout is able to provide reconnaissance with greater mobility and range of sight, given the binocular that could assist in setting targets for the artillery units on ground. All the weapons are not class limited themselves, so they could be looted to be employed by any other class. The same class neutrality applies to vehicles, although it is not possible to steal them outright from the enemy spawn points. When you suffer some form of damage, the screen turns red, with a rapid signal that indicates the direction of the source of the threat. A rudimentary form of area specific damage modeling is implemented, for both infantry and vehicles, and the hit in the leg area means slowing down measurably. It could be called just plain vanilla if it were not a fact that one could snipe a tank occupant through a visor on its hull, which, to say the least, will make the luckiest and unluckiest players of the entire match out of these two particular players involved in sniping a tank. The grenades bounce around in a realistic fashion, and can be thrown back a triggered one provided that it does not explode in your hands. The only small disappointment was that the environmental effects do not manifest themselves very well on the field of battle and they stay static throughout a match. As even a small amount of overcast could attest in terms of its benefits for the fighter pilots, well placed particle effect of dusts kicking up or varying precipitation could have worked wonders in disguising some shortcomings in terms of blocky character model details (which by the way, is the identical model for each side clad in different equipment per class) and lending an even more impressive depth to the expanse. The graphics overall is rather mundane, but the strength of the engine parlays itself into graphical fidelity well. The terrain is very well rendered (very large draw distances), with appropriate amount of foliage that strikes a balance between map object density and render performance. The graphics that portray landmarks and decorative objects are few and far between; the graphics here are all but functional and seem somehow abstract, which is a strange way of describing graphics of all things. It just is without a lot of frills or eye candy, but it would be apropos for a competitive action title to limit some garish graphical features (like motion capture animation, area specific damage models, etc.), when players themselves turn them off to concentrate more on the surroundings, which cannot be emphasized enough when playing games like Battlefield. The impact of graphics could have been greater than sum of its various parts since 64 players can compete in a single round, and all these different elements mixing and interacting on many different levels seamlessly highlight the fact that underlying mechanisms of the graphics engine should hold under the strain, beneath all the eye candies and flashes that impress or disorient for a few seconds. So in Battlefield, the graphics are solid. Another drawback could be from a curious lack of indoor battles, which in sporadic times where it does indeed occur, betrays the rather clunky controls and disorientating aim, not to mention lack of detail that does not simply register in the immersion rating. That is the most glaring when one shoots someone whose reaction to being hit is most of ten than not confused gyration at one place in attempt to get the bearing of the shot’s direction. Some means of making claustrophobic confines of battle more seamless could have been appreciated, like in the Day of Defeat. It does not mean that all close quarters combat is decidedly lacking; in Stalingrad and Berlin maps, one readily participates in battles that portray that hemmed in sensation among destroyed landscapes and a deluge of debris. Another minor quip is the absence of random terrain generator that could have expanded the potential replay value of this title almost infinitely; I am only saying this based on my initial impression of the game built on a flight simulation engine. Nonetheless, the belated map editor was a nice complement, and the result of such option lead to many ingenious maps and mods, the best known of which is a very capable and polished modern update to the game in Desert Combat. One very glaring aspect of this game is that the developer has forgotten to add an actual single player game to the whole proceeding. It is a basic retread of a rather unrelated string of missions that feature the maps from, you guessed it, the multiplayer. It is very much a practice session that allows you to be more familiar with the maps if nothing else, and practice in the finer arts of more challenging pursuits like trying to fly a plane with keyboard and mouse and not crash every ten seconds. Or learning how to drop mines and maintaining self sustaining tank system with an engineer. It is too unfortunate that even enemy AI allows you to indulge in every kind of stupid antics without you dying even once. You can play a tag with them, perhaps hide-and-seek. You can maybe show them of your part of the territory on a wild ‘goose’ chase. Except you be the mother goose and them be goslings. The radio messages provide the audible feedback of the unfolding action. As a neat touch, the messages are recorded in native languages of the nations involved, albeit recorded by the same voice actor per nationality. And there are no female voices; probably owing to the fact that no woman participated in the war in the battlefront. The messages can be relayed using keys mapped to specific calls, but during the heat of battle where they could be the most useful, they end up being a bit unwieldy and underused feature. It could have been nice if there were some ambient music like gentle surf of the sea on the coast, rustling of the pine trees in the tropics, or flies buzzing over a corpse, whatever. The weapon sounds pretty neat, and has an appropriate dimension to it, as well as the whizzing of the slugs as it traces direct lines in the air. There is never a direct utterance from players, not even a scream of impending death if I recall correctly. Once again, as in augmenting the realism of the game that is missing in other departments, maybe a pant after a long run or a nasty case of temporary hearing loss by a nearby artillery shell exploding (if it did not already kill you) could have done wonders. As for the rest of the sound, the music is itself muted during gameplay and a bombastic martial track plays in the background during the title sequence (which plays like some kind of a WWII propaganda movie clip) and menu options. More or less, it serves its theme well. The action itself, when one gets right down to it, is seamless and in a word, elegant. The combat that sprawls across land, sea, and air is so impeccably connected and the heat of the action can flare up in any one moment on any element and soon spill over so quickly that it becomes just overwhelming to coordinate and register all the action despite the well constructed overhead map situated in the corner of the screen. Calm before the storm, as they say. As an example, the landing part of an amphibious assault only requires whoever is at the helm to simply beach the boat ashore, and the anticipated action soon rolls across the land, while the land based bastions aim their shelling at a distant carrier from which bombers take to air…this kind of action can simply be mesmerizing, and if the players coordinate their movements and cooperate through communication, it can be downright heavenly. However, often players fail cooperate, as they end up going about their own business, and the ensuing chaos becomes pretty much as common in public servers (or ‘pubs’) as there are ammunition in the bunkers. Then the wait for vehicles to spawn will seem longer, that great expanse that you must travel by foot will seem farther, and the fun quota plummets as one haplessly plays the part of a staggering soldier when he could have as well been in the thick of the action trying to conserve those last diminishing tickets. These issues are symptomatic of all online based games released requiring any form of cooperation among participants, and cannot really be attributed to the failing on the part of the developers. But on the bright side, if you could play the overall multiplayer action on Battlefield and glean some kind of satisfaction out of it, then you would be tolerant of any shenanigans that continually plague any competitive multiplayer game. Certainly, right out of the box, even without its subsequent mods and expansion packs, Battlefield 1942 provides plenty of content to keep one busy, although the players will sooner or later find themselves favouring one faction over another in a particular map, unless they tend to exploit the advantages given to the starting positions for one faction. For example, on a battleground in Battle of the Bulge, the Americans would be strapped for equipment and well trenched positions as Germans launch a mechanized surprising attack. But fundamentally, such opportunities for exploits that lay outside of historical contexts are rare, since Battlefield 1942 is a well balanced game despite some small qualms such as the seemingly invincible nature of the airborne vehicles. My personal favourite was with playing the Russians, as driving a T-34 running over Nazis has, without a doubt, been the pinnacle of the experience to say the least. I could have run over Russians while driving a Panzer IV, but it would not deliver much of a visceral feel to it. I guess destroying the Japanese with American kamikaze attack was rather interesting too. That is basically the allure of being involved in a pitched battle in Battlefield 1942; the ambience provided by the combat has reached to new heights and gained a whole new dimension and territory in terms of vehicles. For once, you could coax your inner child out and ultimately be a part of a reenactment of a war experience like no other game before could provide within a historical setting. For once, you can harmlessly bypass the utter atrocities that war wrought on its participants and distil only the enthralling aspects of what captured so many youths of old to their suffering glory or perilous doom.
