Battlefield: 1942 Software

Average Rating:

First off: The game looks and runs fantastic. I have a PIII-800 and it runs well. I know people with better machines, and they report it runs fantastic.

The first person shooter aspect runs fine. It isn't groundbreaking when compared to other contemperary FPSs, but it performs well.

The 'flight sim' aspect also runs fine. It seems geared more towards close air support, as high altitude winding air battles ain't happening...but I still feel like I'm 'flying' an aircraft. Strafing and bombing can't be described easily in words...dropping a bomb on an unsuspecting enemy ground troop was a priceless first in my gaming experience :)

The tank/armor/vehicle portion is STRONG. It isn't fancy, but it is fast and furious action, and provided (for me) the most nerve wracking and exciting moments of the game.

The sea aspect of the game scores a little lower than the rest. It just feels a little 'cheesy.' It is hardly a surface warfare game, but then again, it never claimed to be. There is ample opportunity to put sea power to use. The destroyer in the demo MP game made for an excellent bombardment platform. Once you get over the fact that a single man can control a destroyer/carrier, it is rather fun. However, most players tend to ditch the ships for tanks/planes, as they offer more exciting ways to smite your opponents :)

For sheer gameplay, BF1942 scores all 5 stars easily. I have wasted many hours online, every moment of which was exciting and fun. The gameplay is fast, balanced, and easy to jump right into. It also runs great online, and I played in games with a server ping up to about 170, and it was hardly noticable.

My *ONLY* negative comment on the game is the 'realism' claim. In order to make it a fast, furious and easy game to get into, EA had to (understandably) simplify things quite a bit. Clearly, and engineer can't repair a destroyer in 20 seconds (as I was able to do in the Demo). Aircraft in real life can't buzz airfields and pickup teammates on the fly. There are several other examples, none of which take away from the game at all, but are hardly realistic.
The other realism complaint is the weapons and vehicles inventory they are advertising on the webpage. There was a missed opportunity to provide more historically accurate weaponry...specifically, the Russians had plenty of potential weapons that aren't reflected in the game (i.e. the PPsH40, a superb SMG). The final game isn't out yet, so they may very well have added more specific weapons/vehicles (or do a patch later).

Overall, my minor complaints have nothing to do with the actual gameplay. Grab hold and hang on for a gameplaying experience you'll not soon forget!

THE BAD: The single player campaign. If you can call it a campaign. It's merely the multiplayer maps against pathetic bots. If you aren't planning on, or do not have the connection to, play the game online: don't bother. This game was built with online play in mind, and that's it.

THE UGLY: The computing power and connection speed required to enjoy BF 1942 are huge. Even with a 1.47 ghz CPU, 512 megs of DDR RAM, and a 64 meg Geforce3, I still had to adjust the in game graphics settings to get it to run smoothly. It lags quite often, even in single player mode! Now that my settings are tweaked enough, the game runs fine, but still hits an occasional hiccup even over a 784k/256k DSL connection. Don't even bother if you have a dial-up.

BOTTOM LINE: If you have the computing power and the CABLE/DSL/T1 connection to run it smoothly, you won't find many games more fun than this one to play online. The maps, gameplay, vehicles, and soldier classes are all outstanding, and with the abundance of variety in tactical approaches, you'll never get bored. A fabulous game.

There's just so much you can do and so many possibilities, since you can jump into and out of any vehicle instantly and play as one of 5 infantry classes. Even your infantry class selection is flexible, because you can quickly drop your current kit and pick up a dead infantry's kit from the ground, effectively changing your infantry class on the fly.

Also, the weapons and vehicles are all very well balanced. For example: the rocket that the bazooka/anti-tank infantry class fires doesn't do much damage to infantry, unless if it's a direct hit. This makes players have to choose the best kit for what they want to do, and ,unlike Quake and other action games, rocket launchers wont dominate all aspects of combat. They are, however, good at what they're meant to do: destroy tanks, with their shaped-charge explosives. Just the way everything fits together is so beautiful, and there's always a counter for every weapon and vehicle.

The gameplay is so open ended that you can get pretty creative. I've done things throwing all my explosive packs into a japanese jeep (as an engineer), getting my detonator ready, driving to an enemy base or battle, jumping out of my jeep and letting it roll into the middle of enemies, and then blowing it up to get a few kills (especially when they get inside to drive it while my explosives are still in it, hehe) and other crazy things.

The demo has already become the 2nd most played game on GameSpy, beating all others except Half-Life (which has a ton of mods since it's been out so long), so there will probably be a large playerbase, making finding servers easy.

The system requirements may be a little steeper than some other games, but it is well worth it, and the game runs beautifully. (I can run the demo, all graphics options maxed at 1024x768 32bit, on my athlon 1.4 ghz 512mb ram GeForce4 ti4200 128mb at a smooth and high framerate) The models are very well detailed, you can see the eyes on the infantry moving and blinking, and their mouthes opening and closing. The level of detail system allows this by scaling down the polygon counts and stuff as vehicles and infantry get further away from you, and increasing details as things get closer to you, so there's no wasted visual performance.

This game is like many games in one, and has something for everyone that likes action or war games. My favorite genres are action games and flight sims, and the way this game mixes it all together, in an accessible, balanced, and action packed sort of way, is perfect.