Battlefield 1943

Review from:  http://bngames.basicallynothing.com

I thought long and hard about what game I was going to review first, Killzone 2 was the game that came to mind first, but I figured id stick with something not everyone has played yet, and something Ive been playing allot of.  Seeing as this is my first text review for the site im going to breakup the review into four sections, we can tweak the format later to see what works best for future reviews.  The categories are as follows:  Story, Presentation, Gameplay, Special, and Conclusion.  I’m going to also try to keep the reviews simple, I really shouldn’t go into a description of everything you are going to do, and or large chunks of the game as I feel you should play the game and find the good parts out for yourself.  Keep in mind this is my first actual review so yea it might be a bit rough in spots, so bare with me.  Comments afterward are appreciated.

Story: Well….its World War II, its 1943, and your defending and or concurring islands in the Pacific Theater.  Fact.  Not much else to say.  Your either there to dominate or liberate, although flags seem to be the key to victory as with any epic war.

Presentation: DICE has really done this game justice with the Frostbite Engine.  I originally played Battlefield 1942 on a subpar HP Pavilion with a mediocre Geforce 4 PCI vga with 64mbs of SDRAM and AOL as my DIALUP carrier, which for its time was a excellent looking game even with those limitations. BF1943 will not earn my game of the year award for visuals, however you cannot deny its style.  All of the menus look like they were ripped off a US Army “Needs You” poster, your in game achievements are represented as US Stamps, and the over all color is rich and vibrant.  The palette for the world is exceptionally bright for a FPS, the sun seems to bake the sand of the beaches and singe the rocks.  The array of trees provide little shade in the bright light.  the Iwo Jima map in particular is stunning in the sunset saturating everything in an orange tint and glow.  Environmentally, everything is solid.  The ground geometry at times seems a bit off, but you must remember the maps were taken from

BF1942.  The games real strong point visually resides with the vehicles and explosions.  Every vehicle in the game looks great.  The Sherman tanks are by far my favorite vehicle next to the jeeps.  The Frostbite engine explosions from tank file, grenades, aerial bombardment are superb.  If any of you have ever played Battlefield: Bad Company, you will immediately recognize similar visual effects, in particular with particles from explosion models.  My biggest complaint would reside with the character models themselves.  There is no variation other than which class you have picked on either side of the fight.  Extra selectable skins would have been a welcome edition, but seeing how the class system has been simplified, it does make sense of the choice to make each specific class a specific model.

Another honorable mention is the sound design.  I just recently purchased a 5.1 audio system, and have since been testing it on every piece of media in my collection.  So far BF1943 has impressed me the most.  One of my most memorable moments was when a tank fired a shell at me while I was on foot.  The shell missed me but there was this heavy “OMMPHHHH” sound when the shell exploded near my on the field.  Realistically the sound also became muted and muffled as my characters hearing returned to normal.  The sound of cannon fire in the rear speakers as im pressing forward and moments like that really add another depth.

Gameplay: I feel as if the game wants to break free of its console controls and return to the mouse and keyboard.  Shooting takes some time to get accustomed to as the aiming is quick, almost twitch quick.  Pressing down L1 to aim with the Iron Sight slows your aim speed significantly and I find it reminds me allot of Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360.  I would rely on that heavily.  As it does increase your accuracy 10 fold, it also seems to make you more vulnerable to counter attack more so than most shooters that ive played in the past.  Almost every encounter will require the iron sight and you will find yourself strafing in one on one firefights.  One on One fights tend to end in who pressed the trigger first.

The game has broken down the original class list down to three, and combined the former classes into: Rifleman, Infantry, and Scout.  Each has their own strength and weakness.  I tend to stick with Infantry as they automatically come equipped with the Rocket Launcher as their secondary weapon.  With the amount of assaults led by tanks, its almost required half of the troops on your side be ready for mobile artillery.  Some might be off put by the fact that the Rocket Launcher is given freely, but this is balanced by the fact that it is underpowered, inaccurate, and has the longest reload time of any of the infantry weapons.  Tanks require at the minimum 2 direct rocket hits, assuming it has not been repaired by another infantrymen or the rocket glitches and does not “Hit” the tank.  Ive found that rockets themselves seem to lagg a bit be it the animation or it possibly an issue with syncing the streaking projectile.  Im not sure, but it definitely cripples it as an overpowered weapon to use on infantry, in most cases I wouldn’t suggest using it at all.

Vehicles are bit overpowered, but considering Battlefield is a game that by design has you die and respawn almost immediately, this tends to be little issue.  A good tank driver can last a good long while if he/she is careful and doesn’t go running into every territory ground, guns blazing.  The Tank itself maybe over powered, but a concentrated assault of multiple foes will do a tank in quickly.  Ive played a few matches myself where Ive kept the same tank the entire length of the match, although I would say I have considerable experience with such having played all of the Battlefield Games to date.  Planes are still considerably difficult to maneuver, but nothing as frustrating as BF1942 was.  They are also just as fragile and are shot down easily.  I find air combat is a cute little minigame but with the controls being so haphazard it really isn’t much fun to try to dogfight with.  Sometimes you will enter a match where someone is meaningfully using the planes to bombard a location, but I tend to use them at the first spawn of a map to get to the crucial flag points by dropping in via parachute.  True Dual Joystick controls for the plane might have made it a more important part of the experience, but then it could have easily broken the game as they would be overpowered and thus abused.

Special: Really the charm of the game is its over all semi casual, semi hardcore appeal.  I love that the classes have been simplified, getting into a match (For me anyway) has been simple and quick.  It is a good “Im going to play this for 30 minutes while I wait for someone to come on to play Killzone 2 or “-insert your game here-”.  I could play it for longer if I wanted, but it is fairly simple compared to the modern shooters of today.  Considering there currently only 3 maps (Not including the 43 million worldwide kill map unlock) the variety is not enough to keep you on for hours on end, but enough to make you play for a while while when you don’t have much time to.  Its the PSP Shooter of the PS3.

Conclusion: Battlefield 1943 is an excellent game on all fronts, and merits a purchase if you enjoy shooting.  if you enjoy vehicular combat vs infantry this game has an even greater appeal.  Even with the stripped down classes and small amount of maps (Which will be remedied later by DLC) its allot of game for 15 bucks.  If this game was any more it might hurt my overall feeling, but 15bucks is the sweet spot and is a well spent purchase.  DICE and EA have delivered on a quality Casual/hardcore experience, and have done a great old PC franchise justice on the consoles.  In actuality this is the first true Battlefield game that has been put on a console that actually feels like a true battlefield game.

Considering this is my first review im going to go with the 5 star system as a rating guide……..

Battlefield 1943 = ****

http://bngames.basicallynothing.com