Conclusion

While Battlefield 2142 has the series’ typical Conquest mode, the multiplayer beta map has the new Titan mode to play with. Basically the mode is two games in one. Like in Conquest mode, matches have the two teams try to capture and hold different points on the map. The difference is in Titan mode those points also have missile silos that fire their weapons when captured . Those missiles head to the biggest vehicle in the game, the Titan, a massive hovering fortress that is protected by shields. Each team has one Titan to defend. The missiles slowly bring down the shields of the two Titans in the map. Once the shields are down the second portion of the game begins as it turns into something similar to Unreal Tournament’s Assault mode. Your team flies into the enemy Titan (either through air vehicles or through a pod fired from the ground inside an APC), and attempt to blow up the Titan’s reactor. Team members have to shut down four points inside the Titan before access is granted to the reactor. Once that is blown, the match is over. However, the Titan isn’t defenseless. Players can man four locations that can access powerful guns that fire at ground targets and there are also two anti-aircraft guns as well. If you happen to be the commander of your troops you can even pilot the Titan to other map locations.

Graphically the game looks pretty similar to Battlefield 2, with comparable polygon counts, so people who have the last game should have no problem running Battlefield 2142 on their PCs. There are some interesting new effects, such as the previously mentioned EMP, which causes your vision to break up like a bad TV picture. One new item can give players a temporary cloak effect and the various shield effects in the Titan are well done. There were some graphical glitches in the games we played, which is not unexpected in a beta, but overall the game is looking quite solid. The game’s user interface allows you to check out all the stats you could think of following a match for all the players who really want to see how they perform in matches.


The multiplayer beta was supporting 32 players at a time (the final game will have support for up to 64 players). At the moment, it’s still way too early to give a final verdict on how the full game will turn out, but we do know that when we managed to join some matches we had fun using the new weapons and playing both offensively and defensively trying to protect our team’s Titan. We would have liked to played in a map that better reflected the game’s futuristic setting and of course we had to deal with all of the glitches that are always present in a beta version. However, we do like the way the game manages to both reduce the amount of character classes while at the same time opening up the player to really customize their loadout anyway they choose. We hope to perhaps get a chance to play on more maps before the final version of Battlefield 2142 is released later this fall.