Lock and Load

Battlefield 1942 has changed the way that I look at FPS games. While the game is set during WW II and allows players to choose either the Axis or Allied side and fight it out on historically based maps (which has been done only a million times before), Battlefield 1942 also allows you to fight it out in vehicles. That's right. See that Sherman tank? Run over to it, jump in, and start sticking it to the enemy. See that Messerschmitt fighter? That Yamato-class battleship with 18-inch guns? Same thing.

Battlefield 1942 includes 5 different sides, including the Americans, British, Russians, Germans, and Japanese. Maps are based on historical battles and take place in locales spanning the Pacific, Europe, North Africa, and the Eastern Front. However, in any one map the battle is fought between only two sides. Both sides start with a certain number of "tickets," and the objective of each side is to occupy a number of control points in order to reduce the opponent's tickets to zero. Team play is essential to attaining this goal. The game allows the player to select one of several classes, each of which has its own special abilities and unique weapon. Scouts, for example, carry a sniper rifle and can call artillery strikes. Engineers, on the other hand, can repair any vehicle and also have access to mines and explosives. To be successful, a team  usually must have a balance of classes. Different armies appropriately use different weapons, but they are of equivalent types. For example, an American and a German engineer are both equipped with rifles, but the American gets the M1 Garand while the German gets a Mauser. Any class can operate any of the vehicles of Battlefield 1942, which helps them have a great influence on gameplay. There are a few different types of vehicles for the land, sea, and air elements, with each of the represented sides again having their own unit. There is some overlap on vehicles, however; the Japanese use German APC's, and the Americans make use of British battleships on the high seas. This overlap is not necessarily historically accurate, but that does not really make a difference in gameplay.

While Battlefield 1942 can be played off-line against computer opponents, this mode quickly becomes tedious and frustrating because of the flawed AI. Battlefield 1942's bread and butter is online play. Maps are generally very large, and require a correspondingly large number of players in order to have an interesting game. However, even with large maps and numbers of players, the game maintains a pretty decent level of graphical detail. While textures and sound effects can be adjusted to suit a individual player's hardware capabilities, in general textures and polygon counts are acceptable. The environments, however, have been executed with varying degrees of success. The desert and urban environments come across the best, as they are very sparse or consist mostly of geometry. Wooded areas, on the other hand, don't really exist in the game. They are represented mostly as deserts, but with green textures and the occasional stand of trees. A few maps overcome this deficiency (Kursk and Battle of the Bulge come to mind), but I generally feel that Battlefield 1942's environments are pretty bare no matter where they are set.

Controls in Battlefield 1942 are centered around the classic mouse and keyboard "WASD" setup. The aircraft, ships, and land vehicles are all set up pretty much the same, but the player is afforded an insane amount of leeway in personalizing these controls, even to the point of adding a joystick (which really helps with accurate flying, by the way). While the behavior of all the vehicles is arcadey, there is a definite distinction between driving a tank and a jeep. I really can't fault the controls of this game. While the default setups might not be suitable for all vehicles, the customization feature allows the player to work around that problem. Also, keeping the controls mostly consistent smoothes the learning curve and helps players jump into the game more quickly.

Since Battlefield 1942 is published by the same company that handles the Medal of Honor series, comparisons between the sound of the two games are inevitable. Overall, in the sound department I think that MoH betters Battlefield 1942 in most respects, but that is the result of what appears to be a conscious effort on the part of Battlefield 1942's developers to devalue sound in favor of smooth gameplay. There is no music during the actual game, although there are some catchy tunes during the loading sequences. Sound effects have a strangely spotty behavior in the in-game environment, in that they sometimes work and sometimes don't. Just like the graphics, the sound detail level can be adjusted by the user, and higher detail levels do seem to at least partially alleviate this problem.

In many ways, trying to review Battlefield 1942 is like trying to hit a moving target. This is because in addition to two expansion packs, this game has experienced a number of game-changing patches. These patches can radically affect gameplay, for they add weapons to certain armies and change the capabilities of vehicles. Additionally, new maps also become available with each new patch. While none of these changes have affected the game's balance too much, I have tended to find that the new maps tend to focus on one class of vehicle or another. For example, the Coral Sea map was released with a patch and is an almost entirely air-based map. Because of this emphasis on one type of vehicle instead of on a balance of different types, I tend to find that the new maps aren't as satisfying to play as the original maps are. In addition to the patches, I can't overlook the highly active mod community that surrounds this game. There are many total conversion mods available for this game that use the basic framework but change the setting to a different era. My current favorite mod is Desert Combat, which pits the American army against the Iraqis. This outstanding mod allows players access to such weapons as the Abrams tank and the A-10 Warthog ground attack aircraft.

Battlefield 1942 isn't intended to be a perfectly accurate simulation of WW II. However, the developers have instead  brilliantly succeeded in creating a highly playable game in which a player can easily do almost anything. The gameplay environment of Battlefield 1942 is very fluid as a result; I could start off in a plane, get shot down, jump in a tank, and continue fighting. This open-endedness has helped to maintain my interest in the game. I can sit down and play this for hours on end, and not even notice the time fly! While the game's sound and the graphical detail of its environments leave something to be desired, I nevertheless heartily recommend this title to any FPS fan who has a computer that has the cobbles to run it.

By Andy Rucker