Battlefield 1943

Despite the accumulating moldiness of the war theme seen in so many games, DICE’s Battlefield series has rarely disappointed with its persistent installments. The newest entry, Battlefield 1943, streamlines the franchise through Xbox Live Arcade faithfully, plunging you into sprawling Pacific war zones as a soldier in the US Marine Corps or Imperial Japanese Navy. What’s more, 1943 only costs 1200 Microsoft points, so it’s easy to forgive the lack of map and mode variety and occasional frustrations. It’s the Battlefield series at its roots, offering long-lasting multiplayer excellence at an honest price.

1943 is a pick-up-and-play affair, usually taking seconds to jump into a map. Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal and Wake Island are the only maps (excluding Coral Island, a fighter plane only map). Although they’re different in subtle ways, they share the same characteristics of a tropical island: lush grasses, palm trees, mountainous terrain. But these locations are by no means paradise. Players are deployed into opposite ends of the map and must fight over five nodes spread across the island. The more nodes each team controls the more their kills are worth, so it’s likely that the team who controls the most nodes will win. Likely, but not definite, because battle circumstances are always churning and teams are constantly struggling to keep or gain control. There are no quick victories in 1943, allowing for some unpredictable outcomes that keep each match fresher than the last.

Since such a team dynamic is required to win, 1943 bolsters a squad system that’s accessible before the match begins. Squads can respawn at a set point on the map or where living squad members are, though there’s still the option of respawning individually at a captured node. Squads are a helpful feature, since one-manning anything in 1943 usually results in frustrating deaths, but it feels sort of tacked on. Being shoved into a group of two to four people tends to have the same result as twelve. There’s little communication between squad members due to the wobbliness of 1943’s voice chat, so what’s heard through the headset is usually silence. Squads can even polarize a team when victory is hanging by a thread and all players on the team, not just squads, need to co-operate. So playing with friends is the way to go, albeit playing with strangers can still be a blast as long as you’re patient.  

You can also, upon respawning, choose one of three soldier classes. The infantry, rifleman and scout are used for short-, medium- and long-range combat respectively. Their weapons are standard FPS fare and, when used with a tactful mind, can be extremely effective on the battlefield. Infantry can destroy tanks with their rocket launchers, riflemen can flank a base to provide safe capturing, and scouts can land shots from across the map. While using classes to their advantages is rewarding, all classes are vulnerable and stressful to use in certain situations where they’re out of their element. Snipers who can’t find cover won’t last long. Infantry who can’t get close enough to the enemy can only hold onto their helmets and hope not to get killed. Riflemen, despite being the most balanced, can still find themselves annihilated in the face of multiple enemies.

It’s obvious that there’s a certain unity required among soldier classes in 1943, and this is no different for vehicles. Anyone who’s familiar with the Battlefield series will know the sheer vastness of its maps makes vehicles an important asset. You can take to land with jeeps and tanks, to sea with motorboats that can carry up to five team mates, and to air with fighter planes. The land and sea vehicles are fairly straightforward and thrilling to drive due to the neat first person perspective that jostles the camera, though you must be cautious when navigating in narrow and bumpy places. There are plenty of sudden cliffs in each map, and accidentally swerving off one will almost always cause your vehicle to explode and kill you. The fighter planes are even trickier to use because it’s common to crash after clipping your wing against a bushel of trees or getting shot by a turret from below. But if you can get the hang of the floaty feel and dual joystick navigation, fighter planes can be devastating. They are the fastest of the four vehicles and can drop bombs with a cool down time of only a few seconds. Well placed bombs leave enemy nodes consumed in destruction.

And destruction is one thing that distinguishes 1943 from the typical multiplayer shooter. You can destroy almost every structure and tree on any given map, which isn’t as easy as it sounds since the hilly terrains block much of your view. If you manage to get a good vantage point, however, letting grenades and rockets fly always makes for fun results. Not to mention, the explosions look fantastic. You may be jolted out of your seat by an air strike as it delivers a resounding boom followed by a realistic spray of flames. Even throwing barrage of grenades against an enemy tank’s hull as it inches by looks awesome (though not for long, as any adequate driver would momentarily blow you to smithereens).

1943 doesn’t promise anything new, but it does offer the same addictive multiplayer that gave its pedigree a reputation. Since its rocky release on the XBLA, the only addition to 1943 has been the Coral Island map which pits fighter planes against each other in a struggle for territorial domination. Hopefully there will be more maps and features available for download in the near future; but for now, Battlefield 1943 is a fantastic value which encapsulates the core of what made the series great in the first place.