I haven't played a Battlefield game seriously since the original 1942 stormed the online beaches seven years go, so I've been plenty hopeful about how the downloadable quasi-sequel Battlefield 1943 will turn out. DICE held an online multiplayer session recently so we could give the nearly finished game the what-for, and before I get too deep into describing it, please watch this video, in which I die a lot.
With its three player classes and four maps, Battlefield 1943 may not seem like the sort of big, varied Battlefield experience you've gotten used to. But it drills down to the essence of what made the original Battlefield 1942 such an entertaining and enduring multiplayer game: guys driving tanks and flying planes around an island, blowing each other up. For $15, what more do you want?
Sure, some aspects of the game have been simplified. The guns have unlimited ammo. There's no dedicated healing class. You can't go prone. And the larger, landlocked battles of the European Theater are nowhere to be found; this is strictly an island-hopping affair. I fought across three of 1942's classic maps from the Pacific--Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, and Wake Island--and remembered that these maps have a healthy mix of fighting on the ground, on the water, and in the air. (EA wasn't running the fourth map, Coral Sea, which grognards will remember focuses even more heavily on naval and air combat.)
By and large, this feels like Battlefield 1942, though there are a couple of new mechanics in here that change up the gameplay slightly. I found an air raid ability that you could activate from within a specific bunker on Wake Island; once you send the radio request for the raid, the game puts you in the perspective of a bomber squadron that essentially flies itself. You get one chance to bomb per raid, and you can switch to a camera underneath the planes to easily pick your target on the ground. Hit one button and watch a carpet of flaming destruction cover a large area of the ground. This ought to be devastating if you can hit a control point where a lot of enemies are grouped together.
Bad Company's destructible geometry is also in here, letting you do things like plow right through a thicket of trees in a tank, or blow a giant hole in the side of a building that enemies are using for cover. The game seems to be very selective about things you can destroy--it's limited to trees, fences, and buildings, from what I could tell--but that extra freedom should still change up your strategies a bit.
Otherwise, the flow of the battles was remarkably familiar to me, with all the good and bad parts of 1942 more or less intact. The good: rolling into an enemy-controlled camp in a tank, blasting infantry and wrecking opposing vehicles while your gunner up top mows down infantry who are trying to shove a grenade up your tailpipe. The bad: spawning on an aircraft carrier and watching as all your teammates each jump into a PT boat and drive away, forcing you to swim for five minutes to reach shore. Remember that? There's no "I need a lift!" voice macro anymore (nor the classic "Go go go!" for that matter), but then again, in their place we have proper voice chat. I'm excited to play a map like Wake Island once again with real proper voice chat in place to facilitate team strategies and coordination.
Oh, and a note about planes. In the quick look video you'll hear me complaining that the planes in 1943 are pretty much as tough to control as they were in the original game. I'll eat a little crow here; after an additional hour spent with the game, the planes slowly became easier to control, due mostly to the precision afforded by having two analog sticks to steer with. By the end of the multiplayer session, I was actually buzzing over and properly bombing enemy positions, something I never managed to pull off in 1942. There's a tutorial
Those of you who look at 1943 and expect more: Fine, you're right, this is not a full Battlefield game the way Bad Company 2 or Battlefield 3 will be. But considering what other kinds of games have come out on download services in the $15 price range lately, this looks like a significant chunk of game. It captures that large-scale, dynamic feeling of battle that the Battlefield series is known for, and isn't that what really matters?
