This Wednesday a game came out that I have been following for quite a
while. DICE's Battlefield 1943 for the Xbox Live Arcade. It was being
hyped as this summers big multiplayer game. And from the first day of
sales where over eighty thousand people bought the game it seems like
it will live up to the hype. For the first few hours after i bought it
at 9am all was fine, than i started getting random lockups of my 360,
not being able to sync up my EA account with the game. This all came to
a head when DICE announced that they did not expect the amount of users
and the servers were full. Cut to not playing the game till last night
for any amount of time.
The Game play
Yep
its Battlefield: Bad Company in Dub-ya Dub-ya Duse. The controls are
heavy in a nice way and all the guns feel nice. The game is down to
three classes. Your Rifleman has a semiautomatic rifle with rifle
grenades. The Solder has a sub machine gun, bazooka, and wrench to fix
vehicles. The scout has his sniper rifle and TNT that can be remotely
set off. The three classes are well balanced and fun whether you like
sniping dudes, or getting up close with a SMG, one of the three classes
is sure to put a smile on your face.
Tanks, jeeps, landing boats and
airplanes are represented also in 1943 and this is where the game play
looses some of its luster. Tanks on one hand are fun as hell once you
get used to the throttle and break being the left trigger and left
bumper respectively. You can also rotate the tanks body with the left
stick to keep your vulnerable rear end away from enemy fire. Jeeps and
landing craft control similarly with the same throttle set up as tanks.
When
it comes to frustrating controls the airplanes in this game come out
number one on that list. Your rudder is mapped to the left stick and
pitch and roll to the right witch makes for a confusing first flight
when you realize the controls are not inverted for aircraft. This
threw me for a loop as for all of my life when flying an airplane down
is up and up is down, thank god the game lets you invert it and makes
flying a little more fun.
The Graphics
Hands
down the best looking arcade game yet. I have liked the frostbite
engine since I first played BC. Blowing holes in buildings never gets
old, and neither does driving a tank through and shooting the guy on
the other side. Trees also explode nicely, hell everything blows up in a satisfying way. The biggest thing that sticks out to me
about this game is the frame rate never seems to skip even with
everything blowing to hell around you. The water also
is some of the nicest looking water, not in a physics way, but in pure
I want to swim in that water looks. Everything is animated nicely. Its
the little touches like standing in a landing craft and seeing the guy
next to you going through all the motions of reloading that make game
special to me and this game has to many to list.
The Sound
Some
of the best sound I have heard in a while. Distant explosions have
a muffled sound to them. You can see the flash before you hear the
bang. Its just little touches that make it great. Guns sound nice and
meaty, nice bangs all around in this game. There is just one glitch
where the sound cuts out for a brief time, but is not terribly game
breaking at all.
Whatever I'm done
BF1943
is fifteen bucks. Now with the server issue aside, it is one of the best bargains during a otherwise bleak
release summer. Fun shooting, fun vehicles, and three solid maps for the
time being, makes this one of the games to check out this summer.
