Important Notice: As of 8th December 2023, the online servers for this game have shut down and it is no longer playable.
World War II video games have held a great place within the video gaming world with Medal of Honor and the early Call of Duty games. EA & DICE's Battlefield series of video games also like Call of Duty started the series of in World War and beginning things off on the PC with Battlefield 1942. Battlefield 1943, however unlike Battlefield 1942, is a multiplayer only game released exclusively on the PlayStation 3 & Xbox 360 consoles where players fight battles of the Pacific Theatre in World War II. While that means that there is no offline Single Player content to be had here there are also severe amounts of online server and gameplay issues that make this game a war you never signed up for.
Gameplay in Battlefield 1943 takes place on giant maps where the goal of each match is to be able to take over various places before the opposing player team does. The game is played much like the old Star Wars Battlefront games where you need to take over all of the command posts on each map to deplete the enemy team's meter to win the match. The more command posts you take over, which are five on each map, the better and you can respawn at any of the command posts that your team is controlling to get around the map easier. You can also join squads with either randoms or your friends which can also allow you to spawn to them, also making getting around easier as well. There are however only three maps available for offer which are Wake Island, Guadalcanal and lastly Iwo Jima and you are going to be playing those very same maps over and over which makes the map variety very lackluster.
Now before diving into the main serious issues with the game, we should talk about the positives, for starters it does look really good running on the Frostbite 1.5 engine. The models look great, the weapons and vehicles are rendered very well, the explosions and fire effects look fantastic and the maps are very massive and are well detailed, especially with the buildings as well, which look pretty nice. One of the key things about the Battlefield series is the destructible environments where you can blow up some buildings and watch them crumble to the ground and set them on fire. You can also blow-up trees and watch them fall down, sandbags and signs, explosions cause damage to the ground and it is when people are in vehicles blowing up stuff around them and just watching things explode as everything crumbles from afar is where this game truly shines. The sound design is pretty good as well from the menu music to weapons sounding decent and also the sounds from the soldiers when you hear them yell out “Grenade” letting you know to get out of the way.
The game looks fun when you are witnessing all of the explosive combat happening and seeing parts of the environment get destroyed but it is the actual aspects of the gameplay that are where the issues with this game arises. Now the gameplay is class based, you pick from either solider class which has a set loadout, these are an Infantry who has an SMG, a wrench to repair vehicles and a Rocket Launcher, a Rifleman who has a semi-automatic Rifle with also Rifle Grenades and lastly a Scout who has a Sniper Rifle, a Pistol and also can plant explosive charges. There are also vehicles from jeeps & tanks that can help you navigate through the large maps quickly and also your spawn base also has planes that you can take to the skies in dog fights, plus you can also call in a Air Raid to drop bombs on your enemies which helps in clearing out enemy positions.
The gunplay in this game has some serious issues. The game does tell you in the loading screens that you need to fire in short controlled bursts when firing at enemies, however it tends to take a considerable number of bullets to put a single enemy down. Each class has explosives that are meant for taking out enemy vehicles and yet there is no consistency of how many explosives it takes to blow up a tank, one time it may take about two rockets while other times it may up to three or more to blow it up which is just seriously terrible. Also, you have infinite ammo for both weapons and explosives which for Rifles and SMGs is fine and would allow for a more run & gun approach but for grenades and other kinds of explosives they are operated on a cool down system where they replenish for a few seconds before you use them again. This does however mean that players can still get away with spamming grenades and having infinite Rocket Launchers and Rifle Grenades means that players online will spam them just so they can get cheap kills without any skill. I have had matches where players got an insane number of kills just from throwing grenades at my allies or from firing Rifle Grenades for the sake of firing them and this is the epitome of NOOB Tubing at its worst.
The vehicles in the game aren't perfect either, while jeeps and tanks handle fine but trying to aim and shoot at enemies on foot or in vehicles can be a nightmare as tank shots and bullets don't often go where they should even though I have the crosshair at where my shots are about to land on. The Planes on the other hand are the worst in the game with them having atrocious handling and steering making them very tricky to control. It's very easy to confuse yourself with steering and rolling on the Analog Sticks and it is very easy to lose control of the plane and crash into the ground. Controlling vehicles in general is worsened by the fact that the acceleration button is mapped to the L1 Button on the PS3 version which is an oddball pick, like of all buttons available on the Dual Shock 3 controller why L1 to accelerate of all things?
On the subject of controls the rest of them are completely stupid, doing a melee attack switches out to your melee weapon is set to triangle button which is confusing enough to try and get used to, Crouching is set to R3 which is where the melee button should have been set to and this is one of those shooting games on the PS3 where firing weapons is blinded to R1 while Aiming Down Sights is on L1 instead of the other way around. There were times I try to aim at an enemy and it gets close to me I try to do the melee only to mess up by pressing the wrong button which causes me a death.
What really plagues the shooting really hard is one fatal oversight, you see in every online FPS game is that there are hit markers where the crosshairs flash also followed by a hit sound which give you an indication that your bullets hit your enemy. This helps to ensure positive internet connection feedback between the player and the target and this is something that has been a thing since games in the late 90s and 2000s yet Battlefield 1943 doesn't have that. Without any hit markers or hit sounds you don't even know if your bullets are even hitting an enemy or not, you just have to continuously fire at an enemy's chest or head and hope for the best all the while other players in tanks and other vehicles who show up blow you up completely.
To top the whole thing off the game's online servers, suffer from really bad latency causing massive lag spikes. Every time I try to do something and also when I try to shoot someone the server lag causes me to be behind by about two or so seconds which causes me to miss my targets and I die so many times because of it. While I may die because of people taking advantage of me, people doing better than I could but I do feel that it is because the server lag spikes put me behind other people that makes none of my actions count. I also did have times it wouldn't connect to servers when I started the game but when it did connect, I didn't luckily have any disconnections during matches. Now I have played a great number of online FPS games and I used to play the classic Star Wars Battlefront games which are very similar so I do have a decent awareness level when it comes to online games yet I die so easily because I couldn't take cover from enemies or I couldn't destroy a tank because my shots came out too late or I didn't get a Kill Assist credit because my shots even though they hit the target when I aimed down sights on him the game's lagging servers says no hit counted. The lag spikes in this game is a serious handicap that can really ruin the gameplay and enjoyment factor and combine that with the game's poor shooting mechanics and lack of hit markers will no doubt cause you to tons of cheap & very frustrating deaths in almost every match.
Okay I get that you are supposed to maybe play it slow and try to play more defensively and protect your command posts and try to set up traps to take out vehicles and try to get used to the planes instead of running out and try to go for the next command posts right away. However, that isn't easy when you got players spamming explosives for the sake of spamming them and massive lag which makes none of my actions count.
Within only a few hours you will see what the game has on offer, like I said before there are only three maps available and the matches get repetitive after a while. There is a ranking system where you earn points for getting kills, capturing command posts, playing defensively but you don't unlock any new weapons for your class and there are a couple of challenges that you can do if you are patient. The developers did release a new map and mode much later on to celebrate reaching 43 million kills called Air Superiority but however nobody online actually checks out that game mode well at least as of the day I am writing this review up but considering that the planes are such a pain to even control in the first place Air Superiority isn't worth bothering with. It is an online game with massive lag spikes and some of the aspects of the gameplay are hard to get used to when you constantly die so quickly by people who not only know the ins and outs of each map in the game when you are severely delayed by constant lag spikes and there is little you can do about it. Not helping matters is that there are no other options available, you can only jump into Quick Match or set up Private Lobbies with your friends, while there is a Tutorial Mode that introduces the game mechanics there are sadly no options to play with AI controlled Bots to help you get fully accustomed before you go for the online which is a huge bummer.
For a price that is DLC's worth Battlefield 1943 is a stripped back version with atrocious lag and minimum options and features which make this game very pathetic. This game came out a year after the release of Battlefield Bad Company and this is inferior in every sense of the word. 2009 saw some really big FPS releases including Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 & Killzone 2 which all play better and don't suffer from bad lag spikes or anything like that, even Call of Duty World At War another World War II even had better online connections and far superior gameplay than this.
I'm glad to know that EA is shutting down servers for this game along with the Bad Company games on the 8th December 2023 so is it even worth playing this game now in 2023 then let me break this down for you. No! No, you shouldn't waste your time and money on this game, not just because it is going to go offline soon but the game itself having small amount of content, stripped back minimum features and has tons of gameplay issues that makes this a mess of a Battlefield you don't want to be in. With this game being bad it would get worse much later on for DICE and the Battlefield series of video games which I'll may get around to.
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Game Score: 5.0/10
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Game Title: Battlefield 1943
Platform: PlayStation 3
Developer: DICE
Genre: First Person Shooter
Age Rating: PEGI: 16+
Release Date: 9th July 2009
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The Good Points:
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Watching Trees, Buildings and other objects get destroyed and set on fire
Everything looks great from the maps, models and explosions
You can spawn near squadmates making for easier spawns to get around the map
The Bad Points:
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No Offline Single Player Content and no AI Bot Match Options
Just Three Maps
Bad Server Latency that causes atrocious lag
Horrible handling controls with Planes
Terrible Control Layout
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Reviewed by: Anthony Hayball (AQWBlaZer91)
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