Being a typical Scottish male has many distinct features, namely having an accent that foreign women have a liking to, drinking silly amounts of orange fizzy juice that we love to call our own (Irn Bru for the uninitiated) and the ability to be very careful with our wallets when we’re spending money on things. Battlefield 1943 had laid out from the offset what it was going to be, how much it was going to have in the game and when it was coming out. Then it hit us with the cost of all this and to say my jaw hit the floor was a bit of an understatement. £10 (or 1200 MS Points in the other tongue) is a hell of a lot to pay for what is nothing more than 3 multiplayer maps and a choice of the same amount of soldier types…. or so I thought.
Upon loading DICE and EA’s offering you come to realise that this isn’t just a hastily thrown together “let’s rob ’em of their hard earned cash” kind of title. The fact it uses the Swedish company’s Frostbite Engine to render the graphics shows that some time and thought has gone into turning what was a technical play-around by the staff into an actual full-on multiplayer experience. And when you consider that these guys have been doing online war battles for quite a few years, starting with this title’s predecessor, Battlefield 1942, the sheer depth before we even get into the game is rather good.
The initial quantity of product available in this title from the off is three island style maps and 3 different soldier classes. Actual fields of combat consist of Wake Island, a horseshoe shaped area with lots of wide open spaces and two aircraft carriers acting as bases, Iwo Jima, which has similar starting points, with the shape a bit more uniform and a normal island shape with one side bigger than the other and finally Guadalcanal, which has a lot of intertwining roads and variations in height across the playing area, but this time teams start from opposing sides of the land mass.
The three soldier types are pretty much your normal fare. Riflemen are your standard weapon bearers and have single shot guns, rifle grenades and standard frags. The Scouts are your sniping choice, with their chosen scoped weapon, as well as a pistol to compensate for the long range stopping power, but with C4 for sneak attacks and base protection. Finally there is the Infantry who have standard machine guns, bazookas and a spanner to fix any damaged vehicles.
The object of 1943 is to take control of each battle by winning a conquest style match up. Each island has 5 control points spread across it. Your team has to attempt to get as many of these as possible whilst all the time seeing the squad’s health bar going down with each kill. The more territory you own, the more damage to the bar you inflict for each death on the opposing side. There are plenty of vehicles spread all over from boats, jeeps and tanks to planes. The latter are more difficult to control across the skies, but the more seasoned, if not patient player can get a lot of advantages out of it if used correctly.
That’s pretty much what you have available to you from the outset. To the unaware that just sounds like not enough content for too much money. I have to admit I was the same, but then I started playing it and it’s only when you do that you begin to realise the sheer quality on show. It takes a pretty outstanding piece of FPS gameplay to be able to keep people playing when there is less than your standard shooter there and Battlefield delivers this rather well. It’s made even more impressive by the fact that this has no single player of any description, so it has to rely solely on the online matches.
It feels like the Battlefield style of play is best suited for the social playing vibe that PSN and XBLA have, with the stripped down feel of it all keeping things fresh. The other major plus point is that it’s so easy to get into BECAUSE of the minimalist content. You don’t have to sit there and figure out what gun you need or perks you can have to either get you through the game or annoy your opponents. This game, in a roundabout way reminds me of Call of Duty 2, in that the main staying power of that title (and I still play it to this day) is that it keeps everything to it’s most core usage and the gameplay is miles better because of it. It just shows that sometimes less is more and it’s so well done here.
In order to get the DICE experience crammed into a small half gig file something had to give and in a way that’s the graphics. It’s not to say they look terrible, but when you compare 1943 to its big sister, Bad Company, you can see that the Frostbite gaming engine has melted in the Pacific heat and although it still is capable of destroying a load of land mass, it doesn’t quite do as much as you would expect. Nevertheless, it does everything with a certain level of conviction and works well enough to give you enough booms for your buck.
The sound is of special mention, as the sound effects really are well done and it’s a shame not all FPS titles manage to capture the noises and sound bites of a war zone as well as these guys have done. It was the same with Bad Company and they have not disappointed here either, with sniper rifles giving great satisfaction and the standard armaments feeling rather meaty with solid bangs with just the right amount of volume to raise a smile. The music is very minimalist though, but was never really meant to be a major ingredient of the game anyway.
Overall Battlefield 1943 delivers in a way that certainly I, on first inspection anyway, didn’t think possible from the skin and bones content it looked like from the outside. How wrong could I be? This game really does a good job at producing a fine first person experience and doesn’t feel like it’s skimping in any way. The 360 owners now have an extra game mode and island for reaching the 43,000,000 community kill amount asked by the guys at DICE. For that they get Coral Sea, which is a small amount of little bits of land scatted within a set radius and the Air Superiority mode is set to this area specifically, with planes being the only vehicle allowed in a fight for control of the sky. I’m sure the PS3 owners will get this too in a few days, but let’s hope there is some good DLC to come over the next few months.
I have to admit this is a great little game and shows that sometimes in the world of the first person shooter the ability to keep it simple only makes it hard for others to match it. A worthy addition to the online sector of both PSN and the XBLA, without question. Grab your gun soldier; there’s fightin’ to be done!!
VideogameUK Verdict: 8.5/10
This is what you get when you strip off the unnecessary layers of crap from an FPS and make it purely fun again. A worthy addition to any battalion.
