Battlefield 1943 Review - A
Ever since DICE released the original Battlefield 1942, they’ve been making the same amazing multiplayer experience throughout the century and now 7 years later, they’ve come back to what they started. Battlefield 1943 is the spiritual successor to the original class based online multiplayer first-person shooter experience. While the game uses a new engine, much more beautiful visuals, and has only 3 maps, the game remains true to the original.
I’ve played many games in the series. I especially loved to play Battlefield Bad Company endlessly with my friends. I loved the destructibility that it offered and as soon as I heard about Battlefield 1943 I was sold. The fact that there was another Battlefield game was enough. Then the fact that the destruction was even better, the game was set in World War II, which only cost 15 dollars, and you could fly planes? That just made it seem better and better.
But DICE didn’t think that many people would purchase the game. When it was released, many people couldn’t play the game due to lack of servers. For others, including myself, the issue was the EA user accounts. Thanks to DICE’s partnership with EA as publisher for the Battlefield games, people have to create multiple accounts for every battlefield game and if you don’t remember a username or password, then good luck. The only way to get a real fix is to call them, but don’t look on EA’s website, they don’t have it. Google it and have something to do while on the phone, the wait was 20+ minutes.
1943 uses an upgraded version of the Frostbite engine used in Battlefield Bad Company. So if you played Bad Company (BC), you’ll have no trouble getting used to it. The controls are slightly tweaked and are nicer than BC. The graphics are about as amazing as before, but are much more tropical than the broad forests from before. At one point in the tutorial (a chance to learn about the game before you play with other people), I remarked about how perfect a place this would be for a vacation. The water looks real and moves realistically. Buildings blow up even bigger than before. Hand grenades can open up walls unlike before. Even Jeeps go right through buildings. In fact, 1943 really just wants you to blow up everything you can. There are always a group of red explosive barrels that blow up half of any building. However the really big red barrels don’t blow up with bullets. You need an explosive to shoot those and when they explode, they don’t blow up the other big red barrel right next to it.
The other big change is there are only 3 classes to choose from. Battlefield 2 had 7 and then BC had 5 and now only 3? But the good folks at DICE know battlefield and created a perfect fun balance. I mean it. Each class has their strengths and weaknesses which combined with the 3 stellar maps makes for one of DICE’s best Battlefields yet. The three classes are Rifleman, Infantry, and Scout. The Rifleman has an M1 Garand (both the US and Japanese factions) with 2 hand grenades, 3 rifle grenades and a bayonet. The Infantry class has a Submachine gun with 2 hand grenades, 3 rocket launchers and a wrench for fixing vehicles and whacking enemies. The Scout has a sniper rifle, 3 satchel charges (like the BC C4), a pistol, and a bayonet or katana if you’re Japanese. One thing you should notice is that you have infinite ammunition with everything. You may run out of your two grenades or 3 satchel charges, but wait a few seconds and they’ll recharge as if never used before. This sounds a little ridiculous, but what it really does is remove a need for extra ammo. Also you’ll probably die before you need to find more ammunition anyway.
The achievements are lacking in difficulty (I got almost all of them the first day) the game continues tradition of having awards for good gameplay such as Rifle Efficiency for “4 kills with the rifle” and harder ones such as Milk Run for when you “fly a plane for twenty minutes”. DICE was even nice enough to add an extra gameplay mode for all players on each system once the community reached 43,000,000 kills. The Xbox 360 players have already unlocked the new mode titled Air Superiority and if you haven’t guessed, it’s a battle fought with just planes. Yup, in case you wanted to just have aerial dogfights, well now you can when you choose the mode. You start on a carrier, then hop in a plane and fly over to the opposing side to shoot down enemy fighters.
Have you heard enough yet? Well, If you’ve ever been interested in a online multiplayer FPS experience, then why not slap 15 bucks down and buy yourself Battlefield 1943 already! I can honestly say you are getting more than your money’s worth with this game.
