With such a good reputation, this game failed to meet my high expectations.
PROS:
+Large, open-ended maps
+Vehicles
+Riding in planes can be so much fun
+Varied maps, including all major factions of WWII
CONS:
-Too many glitches
-No matter what ping you have, you will get lag
-Empty servers
-If you do find a server, the community is terrible
-Sloppy offline AI
-Bad controls
-Hit detection issues, most noticeably in the sniper rifles
-Vehicles, artillery, and weapons all feel unbalanced
-Game relies too much on online play
-Lack of engaging single player; no story
-The game feels rushed into production
-Graphics are OK, but could be better
-Sound quality needs much more work
-Spawn killing, even if the losing team deserves it, does nothing to make the game any fun
PREFACE
When I bought the Battlefield 1942 collection from my local game dealer, I was thrilled. I really expected something special. I had never played a Battlefield game before, and I wanted to see where the series all began. Unfortunately, the game is plagued by jerky controls, hit detection problems, and unbalanced weaponry. The multiplayer, which constitutes the backbone of this game, has also been almost entirely deserted in favor of different titles. With such a good reputation, this game failed to meet my high expectations.
Since I cannot make a fair comparison with modern games today, I can still take my previous experiences with similar shooters released around the same time as Battlefield 1942's. The first that comes to mind is Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, which was also released in 2002 and published by EA, so I will be referencing this game a couple of times. And yes, I have played both of these games very recently for at least several hours, so I feel that my judgments between these two games will be pretty accurate and fair.
NON-GAME RELATED
Okay, first things first. My first real problem with the game was the unfriendly installation procedure. I did get the complete collection, which included a whopping 8 CD-ROM discs for installation, two for 1942 itself, and one for PunkBuster. The copyright on the back of the box claims that this compilation was released in 2005, and if I am not mistaken, DVD-ROMs had already replaced CD-ROMs almost entirely, though I can remember games like Call of Duty 2 still using this aging format (it came on six discs.) I found this amount to be quite ridiculous.
After finishing what felt like a primitive installation guide, I booted up 1942 and immediately encountered a game killing error. The screen was totally blank. I ran it on Windows 7, which may have been the reason. After running the game in XP mode, the game was fine, but it still crashed every now and then, which was incredibly annoying. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault did not have this problem at all- I was able to run the game perfectly on Windows 7 without any of these problems. So, this is also unacceptable. It was also the first indication to me that this game was probably rushed into production.
GAMEPLAY
Now getting into the gameplay. I realized immediately after playing the single player campaign that this was meant to be a multiplayer only game. There is no story or plot in the single player campaign. This really disappointed me. I was never too big on multiplayer shooters, so the story is what I usually played for. But sadly, the developers did not even attempt to create a worthwhile single player experience. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is a great example of a WWII shooter with an engaging campaign, which clocks in at around 10 hours depending on the difficulty setting. There just simply is no excuse not to include a story mode. To put it simply, the single player campaign is exactly the same as multiplayer, but with almost hilariously dumb A.I. thrown in. The bots had so much trouble navigating the terrain and always moved in scripted, predictable paths. Turning up the difficulty only made them much more accurate. In fact, they could stand 500 yards away, blindfolded, and still pop you in the face as if you were at point blank range. It is exactly this kind of A.I. that really frustrates me, so I abandoned the single player campaign very quickly. There was very little entertainment to be had.
The controls were awful and did not help the gameplay at all. I have played Allied Assault, Half-Life, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and those games had much smoother, responsive controls, not to mention that they were all released near the same time as this game. My character's movements always felt stiff and delayed. I could never get the hang of it. The airplane's controls were tricky to learn, but after trying it out for a while, I eventually came to realize that it was the only good controls in the game. Everyone, including myself, had a frightening tendency to clip through the scenery, something that should not have been an issue going into 2002, let alone 1992 when Wolfenstein 3D was released. Throwing grenades felt clunky. You get this odd animation of tossing a grenade, and then it would finally throw about a half second later. My weapons never seemed to hit a target, even when it landed dead center on a target's chest. According to Wikipedia (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitscan), the early Battlefield games used hit-scan detection, so my misses were obviously due to a fault in the game's bad hit detection. Even the sniper rifle could not hit a still person.
The weapons felt extremely unbalanced. You could literally pound someone in the head five or six times and not kill him. I know this game was more in the style of Quake when it was released, but the amount of hits it took to kill an opponent as an infantryman was just ridiculous. This game apparently favors the bigger, meaner weapons. Going as an infantry unit will almost guarantee immediate death. If you are not firing artillery or dropping bombs from a plane, you WILL die. The problem is, there are few vehicles at any given time, so sometimes you are unable to get inside one, forcing you to wait until another one magically reappears. This game's strongest emphasis is clearly on teamwork. That is really all it comes down to. In order to win a game, you had to be able to communicate with your buddies and plan ahead, so it was a lot like football or basketball. But since there was hardly anyone online to play with, this element is just impossible to work with.
Glitches also plague this game. Once too many times, I would try to capture a flag when there were no enemies nearby. I would stand there for two minutes, then three minutes, then four, only to find out that you couldn't capture it because of the glitches. I am fully aware that two opposing forces in the vicinity will result in a conflict until one side dominates the other, but I really mean that the game would glitch out and not let me capture a flag. Even the patch did not solve these problems.
MULTIPLAYER
Now for multiplayer. I can't really say much here because I had significant difficulty locating a server within 100 ping or less. Despite upgrading to the latest patch, there were next to no populated servers. Even the GameSpy Arcade finder did not do much. The servers I did find had way too much ping. When I finally found a server that I could play on, I was banned instantly, for no reason at all. I could already tell that the community was certainly less than welcoming. Not only that, most servers would kick me without any warning for getting a single teamkill. Okay, well when you are getting boxed into the only spawn point you have left and you are getting spawn killed, it is very tempting to just throw grenades all over the place just to get two seconds to react. But no, it seems like the admins would rather have your team lose so many valuable tickets than to let you at least have a fighting chance. The experience overall was not much better. Even with the more advanced opponents, many of the same problems existed. One additional thing to note is that I must have been called a newbie or something similar no less than 100 times in a single minute, but how not to be one when you are faced with terrible controls and glitchy gameplay is way beyond me. I cannot blame the game for its lack of dedicated servers, since it is nearly ten years old by now, but the multiplayer is sadly where this game is meant to be played. I was just simply unable to find a good server, welcoming players, and therefore, a decent experience.
GRAPHICS
The graphics in this game were not terrible, but I could not say that I was in any ways impressed with them. I already thought that Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault looked infinitely better. I did appreciate the large scale of the maps, though, so there is at least one good thing I can say about this game. The textures were bland and the water looked pretty dated in comparison to the two games mentioned above. The models were probably the best looking part. However, the same cannot be said for when they clip through the environments way too often.
SOUND
The sound in this game was also a very weak part. None of the weapons gave me the feeling that I was in a battlefield. It sounded very cartoony and unconvincing. If they had more punch to the sound, given it some more bark, it would have sounded better. The explosions sounded nothing like what you would expect at all. The voice acting was decent, if not remarkable. The soundtrack was almost nonexistent. There was only one song played on the title screen, and it was forgettable.
THINGS I ACTUALLY LIKED
Since I am editing this review right now and trying to decide on my final verdict, I will say a thing or two that I did like about this game. Okay, for one, I really liked how this game had all the "major" factions of World War II. Games like Call of Duty never seemed to do this. It was even better when the expansion packs added more minor factions. The maps and their incredible scale and sometimes design amazed me. Each were varied with terrific detail and could occasionally be really fun, like the one where the Americans are defending Wake Island against the Japanese. The briefings and debriefings behind each mission intrigued me- they were very creative. I just would have liked to know the actual outcomes to these battles, rather than just your team's skills be the deciding factor. To quote from Anonymoe's review, "Battlefield 1942 is about letting the players do all the war simulating." That is exactly what I felt this game was trying to do- to re-enact the Second Great War from a comic book perspective and put you in the thick of it. I still do not think that it is a legitimate excuse for not making a decent single player campaign, but I rather like this concept quite a bit. I liked how the maps were all open-ended and made for some interesting tactics. Riding the vehicles just for the hell of it could also be fun, too. This game was not totally bad, I had some fun moments in it. And it is my hope that every game has its moments. I would not have even played this at all if it did not have a thing or two good about it.
CONCLUSION
But overall, I did not enjoy this game very much. Even though it is nine years old, I had much higher expectations for it than it could deliver. The game is simply busted, broken, and buggy. A few more months of production might have removed most of the glitches in this game, but otherwise, there are little redeeming features to be found here. Because of this, I cannot recommend this game to anyone, even to die-hard Battlefield fans who are eager to know how the series started. Many people will disagree with me, and I can understand why everyone seems to like this game a lot. Indeed, this game must have been a milestone to the first person genre back when it was released, but the almost completely empty multiplayer a decade later leaves something to be much desired. I honestly feel that if this game had been a little bit more balanced and had a decent single player experience, then it would be a much better game. Yes, I am willing to try the newer titles in the series, but this game just bombed in every area of good game design. If you want to play a good classic WWII shooter, I would definitely suggest Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Return to Castle Wolfenstein before giving this game a try. These games are both solid, have much better controls, have outstanding single player campaigns, less glitches, and more intelligent A.I., not to mention that they are just as memorable to me today as when they first came out. If you honestly do not like either of these games above Battlefield 1942, then I will be completely amazed.