Gameplay

Eat hot lead

Battlefield 1942 is a blast, the kind that comes from the 16” shells that the USS Missouri hurls. It’s like the 'merely' great multiplayer from RtCW was taken and refined to excellence. Truthfully, after playing the game, ones comes to the conclusion that there is no finer activity in life but to log on and lob some bombs at an IJN carrier or put a hole in the side of a T-34/85 with a Tiger’s 88mm.

Even when no one co-operates together, we had no problems finding fun. It’s as rewarding to jump into an AA gun on a carrier and feed flak up to the flyboys as it is to sneak around with a sniper rifle, or lob hot lead from a tank. Maps are generally balanced, and even an inferior team can win by the use of superior strategy. Any balance problems can by server admins through changing the ticket values, giving one side more or less to compensate. While it is no Tribes, we can see BF1942 lending itself to hardcore play. The maps are a bit too large for effective teams, since bringing 16 people together (plus reserves) is much harder than getting eight friends to join you for some havoc.

Kursk

Take a car and drive it into a tank

Or just take a tank

Conquest mode is where the game really shines, in fact it is usually the only way worth playing. Capture the Flag works on some maps, but a match on Berlin can go for hours without either side getting a score. While the other modes do work, it is clear that no compromises were made to the play in Conquest.

Problemo?

Singleplayer, if you haven’t guessed yet, is a joke. The campaign mode is little more than playing the maps through in a series until you beat them. AI suffers from Daikatana syndrome. On the one hand, the things that the bots accomplish are really rather amazing. They fly, they snipe, they run and gun, they can pilot tanks and ships. On the other hand, they’re totally unnatural and blatantly stupid at times. When on your team, they can be as stupid as Superfly and Mikako from Daikatana. When opposing you, they’re generally smarter and get the kind of aim that gets the Q3A bots on Nightmare mode jealous. Either way, they are completely artificial and show none of the ‘life’ that bots in UT displayed.

Purty water

I wonder when he'll notice

Laying mines down

The performance of the game is horrible. In singleplayer, the bots can slow a computer down to a crawl. In multiplayer, it is usually the server’s fault. Everyone and their mother has at least a 24-player server, but only about one in three of those can actually run decently at that speed. The others suffer from lag that ranges from spiky (like when making high-speed maneuvers in a vehicle) to unbearable. With the official EA servers out of the equation, the ratio gets much worse. To make matters worse, a good 25% of all servers are passworded, seemingly 24/7, always with 0 players. Why host a server if you’re not going to let people play on it? We already mentioned the rather heavy system requirements.