Battlefield 1943 Review

All the way back in 2002, DICE released Battlefield 1942, the first in an extremely successful FPS franchise, at the height of the World War II shooter’s popularity. It’s been some years since and we’ve seen the fall of WWII and the rise of modern warfare, beginning with games like Battlefield 2 and reaching their inevitable pinnacle with Modern Warfare 2. Acting as a breath of fresh air in today’s Middle-East-trouncing and M4-firing FPS market, Battlefield 1943 brings the classic combination of land, sea, and air vehicles of 1942 to consoles in beautiful high-definition and all for a low, downloadable price tag.

The most noticeable difference between 1943 and the original 1942 is the beautiful AAA title graphics and the fully destructible environments that first made an appearance in DICE’s Battlefield: Bad Company via the Frostbite engine. While it may not look quite as good as Modern Warfare 2 or other recent titles, Battlefield 1943 blows all other downloadable titles out of the water (think CellFactor: Psychokinetic Wars). Explosions look great, trees wave side to side with the wind, strafing planes kick up sand and dust with every shot, and watching the battlefield get blown apart over the course of a game is extremely satisfying. EA DICE really brought their A-game in giving 1943, a downloadable title, the graphics you’d come to expect from a full retail game and a good one at that.

In terms of gameplay, Battlefield 1943 keeps it simple in a good way. Slimming the class count down to three (infantryman, rifleman, and scout) and keeping the vehicles simple (one tank, jeep, boat, and plane per side) gives the game a classic rock-paper-scissors approach to strategy that is easily grasped by even the most casual of FPS players and gives the game a more arcade-type experience that keeps things fun and fast. As is the cliché, this is a game that is easy to learn but difficult to master.

The main game mode has players fighting across large Pacific-Theater-themed maps and vying for the control of different points in areas such as lighthouses, airfields, and bunkers. As players die and one team controls a majority of these points, a ticket counter lowers (one ticket per player death and so on) until one team is left without a single remaining ticket and their opposition is declared the victor. It’s a nice game type that allows those players fond of team deathmatch to do their part while fans of objective based games can do their part effectively as well. It’s extremely similar to Battlefield 1942’s most common game type and it’s good to see that it still hasn’t lost its charm over the years. With two game modes and only four different maps, it would be easy for 1943 to fall quickly into repetition and uniformity, but for the most part, this is avoided by the sheer size of the maps, unlockable badges/ribbons (acting as a much more substantial achievement/trophy list), and the nice addition of Air Superiority, a game mode featuring only planes set on its own unique map Coral Sea.

Not available at launch, the Air Superiority and Coral Sea map were unlocked through an interesting community event in which the entire player base of a console would unlock the game mode and map once a certain total kill amount had been reached. Although this type of thing has been seen sparingly in the past (Noby Noby Boy), it gave the game a sense of community and drove the player to play more in order to gain additional content. Unfortunately, DICE hasn’t kept up or announced any details on events like this in the future and it seems like the Coral Sea community event was more of a ploy to sell copies. at launch rather than the life-extending types of events seen in other games (such as Valve’s Team Fortress 2).

With absolutely no single player component to speak of, it’s all about the multiplayer in Battlefield 1943, and thankfully, it shines. With the ability to group up into squads and spawn at both controlled points as well as squadmates in the heat of battle, team play is rewarded and encouraged on both a team-wide scale and an individual scale as additional points are rewarded for aiding your teammates in battle and the larger the group of players near an enemy point, the less time it takes to be captured. This all can make for a great experience, but as is the case with so many team based games, it can be quickly hampered depending on those you are playing with. Voice chat works within squads only and as such it can be a helpful tool as long as those who you are playing with have a microphone… and the voice chat decides to work. As is the case with a few of EA DICE’s titles (like Battlefield: Bad Company), the voice chat is sporadic and low quality on a much more regular basis than is desirable. This will lead to frustration as you spend lots of time trying to figure out if it’s the game, your microphone, your internet connection, or squad, etc. Although this seems like something that could be rather easily patched (as has been entirely remedied in Battlefield: Bad Company 2), at the time of my last playthrough the problem persisted.

Voice chat problems aside, Battlefield 1943 performs well on both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 with a consistently smooth frame rate and clean, effective controls. Although they tend to be few and far between, the game has its small share of bugs that’ll get you killed a few more times than you’d like. These glitches aren’t common enough to limit the game in any sizeable fashion and tend to be flukes rather than anything endlessly troubling.

Overall, EA DICE has crafted one of the most fully-fledged, best looking, and most action packed downloadable titles ever released. For its low price point (around $15), Battlefield 1943 offers an FPS experience that plays and looks like a full retail release that is limited only in terms of its overall content. This is an absolute must buy for any console FPS fan looking for a something new to fill the void between the AAA titles. If their experience is anything like mine, the hours will start to dwindle away as the fun and the action keeps on coming.