Battlefield 1943
This review is a tough one. I have mixed feelings about this game. I absolutely love it but there are minor-but-important issues that make me want to quit the game after an hour of playing. If you haven’t seen the gameplay, the most simple way to explain it is First-person-shooter version of Warhawk with better picture but not as smooth in terms of gameplay! (maybe I’ve just got used to Warhawk)
please note, the video is captured from the demo but the review is based on the full game.
The game is so simple! Two teams; United States Marine Corps or Imperial Japanese Navy. Three classes and two weapons only for each. No game types here. There is only one! Kill enemies and capture bases till the enemy runs out of respawn tickets!
The variety of things you can use against your enemy is actually impressive. There are boats, jeeps, airplans, air strike, tanks, machine guns and anti aircraft guns available to be used. Everything is basic so expect no auto aiming or locking system. No missles either! Remember it is happening in 1943!
You’re in an open world and almost anything can be destroyed! Trees, fences, walls, sandbags and even bridges. Something similar to “Battlefield: Bad Company” in fact they both use the same engine (Frostbite Engine). You can imagine how fun is to run over a fence with a tank and blow up a building where the enemy is camping in! 
The airplanes are powerful but so hard to control. Left analog stick controls moving left and right, and right stick is to tilt. L1 is accelerate, etc. Too many keys already I had little to no success flying one in an effective way! The best use I could find is to fly to where I wanted to go and parachute out! I’m sure I’ll get better if I use them more often 
So far great, almost perfect, almost…
Here are some points I found not-that-great!
1- The controlers are unique and hard to get used to! L1 is aim, R1 is shoot, R2 is for changing weapons and L2 is grenade. Triangle is switch to knife. That’s right, you’ll switch to knife (or wrench) and need to hit it again to hit an enemy close by! Then you’ll need to switch back to your weapon if you want to shoot again! In action, there is usually not enough time for that! Thank God square is still reload! Holding L3 down while moving means running but you can not do anything while you’re running, not even swapping weapons. It totally ignores any input. The game has certain predefined sets of controls that you can change to but it doesn’t let you customize it completely!
2- It happened many times that I respawned exactly where there is an enemy tank and I got killed in split second before I even move! The AI doesn’t seem smart enough to put you far from enemies nor it gives you any invincible time to find your situation.
3- The other one seem to be a bug. Although most buildings can be destroyed by a tank, there are concrete ones that can not be destroyed. Hiding in one of them when a tank is shooting at you seem to be a good idea, right? WRONG! For some reason if the tank shoots at the wall you can evantually die while the wall stands still between you and the shooting tank! how?! hmmm, sounds like a mystery to me!
4- There are some sort of in-game achievements you gain while playing and they appear on your screen as stamps! They are not small and they don’t appear in the corner of your screen! No! Right at the middle! Centered perfectly!
5- You don’t get to choose the server or the map you want to play on! It only has “Quick play”! “Quick” comparing to what? Usually games with “Quick play” option, have another non-quick method which lets you select the server and map but not this one! It automatically decides them all for you!
6- Playing online with friends is surprisingly confusing! Someone should go to a menu, send an invitation, then join a game, then the other guy should press triangle to find “Pending invites” and hit join, only to get an error message saying game is unavailable which probably means that server is full and because of point number 5, there is no way to avoid it! At least not that I could find!
I’m sure I’ll either find a way to resolve some of these issues or get used to them over time but I brought them up because I feel this game could be as big as Warhawk.
Overall, I believe, for $15, this game is worth every single penny but I hope EA would release patches and map packs.
Review followed up by mikestrife
On July 16, 2009 / Game review based on PS3
The floodgates seemed to have been blown wide open for budget downloadable multiplayer FPS titles. First we had CellFactor, and then Punisher, now Battlefield 1943 is out. I have to admit that I hadn’t played a Battlefield game until Bad Company came out. I rarely heard about the franchise until then, but shortly after its release all I heard was great things about Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 1942. I never got around to those older titles so I was happy to see that Battlefield 1943 came to consoles, and for an excellent price.
First off, I agree with Jiosis, Battlefield 1943 is a great game, In the first days since launch I’ve spend more time with it than I do most FPS game’s multiplayer modes. Its 3 (soon to be 4) maps, and only 3 classes may limit customization, but leaves the player feeling less overwhelmed. There’s no need to try out a dozen classes to see which suits each map and which ones are right for you.
For $15 you’re really getting a good experience. Compared to other budget FPS titles Battlefield is an all around better game. It’s up there with the multiplayer modes of most AAA FPS games. Of course DICE (the developers) did get a bit of a head start on this game. Rather than having to start from scratch on this game, DICE could leverage the Frostbite engine that was created for Battlefield: Bad Company. With an engine created for a full blown disc title, now repurposed for a downloadable budget title DICE manages to get a far better game out there for the development cost.
Unlike Jiosis, I didn’t have much difficulty getting used to the controls. I’ve played a ton of different first person games and am not used to a standard control scheme so once I knew what each button did it seemed like a good controller layout to me. Having only the quick match and create a match options is annoying. Not being able to search for games by specific criteria is a pain, especially when you want to join a game that has some open slots for friends you’re waiting for, but don’t wanna be playing alone waiting for strangers to join.
I really have 2 major complaints about this game.
First is the voice chat. Sometimes it cuts out partway through the game, which would be a huge pain, if it wasn’t so annoying to begin with. The main problem is that it’s always open, and there are always a couple gamers who are talking to someone else in the same room, or have a loud TV or other background noise coming through. I end up just not using my mic because of these issues combined, but that kinda ruins the feel of a team based shooter.
Secondly is that the game only uploads your stats to the server when you quit a game. It doesn’t keep your stats updated constantly, or even at the end of each match. This won’t be a big deal, except if you get disconnected after a couple hours of playtime. If you do get disconnected from a match, the game suddenly forgets it has any new data to upload and you lose all the XP, Ranks, and awards you’ve gained. In the first couple days of play I had to raise up the first 3 ranks 3 times! That’s crazy. I ended up just quitting a game after every match to ensure it saved, but the game doesn’t let you quit at the end of a match, so you have to wait through the stats screen and loading the new map until you can quit. This is a killer for me, and may have me turn off the game completely.
So that’s my take on this game. It’s great and worth a buy if you can put up with those REALLY annoying issues.
If you do pick up the game let me give you one piece of advice. No matter what team you are on, everything blue is your team/base/etc, everything red belongs to the enemy. It’s a simple concept but can take some getting used to for most players who think of teams in terms of red vs. blue, or traditionally link US with Blue and Japan with red.
Like this game? Order it online
