Battlefield 1943

1943 is meant to be an accessible, quick and fun representation of its original BF42 and succeeds by most accounts. It's arcade-y, it's action-packed and fast-paced. It's £10 or $15 USD and for that price its undeniable that people will buy this game regardless of that I mention here (and truthfully, you should too) but I wanted to mention a few things about why this game was made in the first place. This is not meant to be a history lesson, but let me put in context for you why and how this series has such a cult following, and why I'm certain it has let down its audience.

I've played a lot of the Battlefield franchise, and they just don't make games like they used to. Long gone are the days of jumping jeeps through the air kamikaze-style as an effective method to blow up a tank. Wing-riding is hardly an effective strategy to swoop in and capture the flag anymore. And how often do you see two opponents frantically circling one another in the distance, and get up closer to see who wins the knife-fight?

Granted, 1942 was something new and felt somehow accidental in its wide-open-worldness. The simple and ridiculous instances of 'wing-walking' and 'knife-fights' are only a few memorable experience that can hardly be said to have been built into the game. These aspects were more a side-effect of how so many of us stretched the limits of a dense and interesting world. The open-worldness and focus on physics and strategic dynamics between infantry, armour, air support and navy allowed for Battlefield to be tremendously sandbox-y and diverse.

As a result of the possibilities this game opened up, the modification communities developed all kinds of spin-offs. Galactic Conquest was a Star Wars mod where you could literally run the Death Star trench or board a Star Destroyer. Forgotten Hope focused on military infrastructure and prided itself on historically accurate weaponry and vehicles taking place in real WWII scenarios like Stalingrad, Caen or the Fallaise Pocket. Battlefield Pirates was absolutely ridiculous, but surprisingly polished in its use of Naval pirate-ship sieges and Castle cannon-defense. Battlefield 2, although lacking in variety of game options, pushed the envelope for team tactics and out of that we've seen Forgotten Hope 2 and Project Reality.

The further renditions of Battlefield as 'Heroes' and '1943' have been less and less focused on innovation in developing an interesting world and more and more focus on stringing together regurgitated instances of 'gimmick'. Granted, I'm sure that I'm the minority in my willingness to download and install unstable code on to my PC to see what weird shit people have been coming up with, but the loss of focus on that kind of innovation with the sequels in this franchise are indicative of their intentions. It's obvious that this is no longer Battlefields focus, and to me it's a shame that EA DICE would rather cash-in on our wide-spread nostalgia instead of working on something new.

All of that said about history of a franchise and my complaints of a company's moral commitment to its consistency aside, (Yes, I realize how ridiculous that is) Battlefield 1943 is only $15 USD which can hardly be said to be not worth it to purchase. Even if you were to play it for twenty minutes at a time, that twenty minutes would be well worth it. The overall experience of '43 is extremely close to the original. The maps feel and look the same with some enhancements that make the experience more focused on an arcade-style.

Playing as either the US Marines or Imperial Japanese Navy you have the option of three individual classes. Each class has an infantry, anti-armour and melee weapon that, depending on the class, is more or less effective than other classes. Rifleman, which is equipped with a semi-automatic rifle and rifle grenades is more apt at mid-to-long range combat, and less effective against armour. Additionally, they hold a wrench used for repair of vehicles and bridges as well as melee. The Infantryman holds a close-range sub-machine gun that is effective almost exclusively at close-range and a bazooka which is a very effective anti-armour weapon. The scout is equipped with a scoped-rifle best used at long-range, and remote explosives which are excellent for anti-armour, but take some talent to use effectively. The dynamic between classes is obviously geared toward cooperation in their combination. This is tremendously effective when grouped with friends over voice-chat and with the option to 'spawn on team-member' instead of at the nearest capture-point, it's remarkable how well a working team can clean up in one round.

There is tremendous intensity in the destructible environments and moments of where cooperation are outstanding, but it has its departures from the original. There is little to no focus on attack or defense and the most common thing to do is spawn as a Scout, and run up the nearest hill to snipe as many people from a distance as you possibly can (that's of course after all the planes have been taken). In some ways, I guess this is what Battlefield is known for, but this 'deathmatch' style, I would argue, had been developed and worked on to make for a more enjoyable experience. What BF43 needs is the same thing that expansions and mods had fixed years and years ago with games like Desert Combat or Forgotten Hope. Instead of having every flag capturable, have push maps with controlled bottlenecks developing a front. Otherwise, without specific goals and objectives, there is little-to-no focus. Without a recognized front, we might as well be playing Unreal Tournament.

Another note concerning objectives that I feel I needs to be made all on its own... where the hell is capture the flag?

To add to the departures made in this downloadable rendition, some of the best parts of BF1942 were the differences in weapons and the diversity of Axis having heavier automatic weapons, while the Allies would typically be better mid-to-long range with their semi-automatics. This diversity made for such interesting dynamics and tactics in play, and I'm frankly surprised that instead of adding this dynamic element, they leveled the playing field by making the Japanese Rifleman's weapons the exact same as the American's. Of course, the decision for this was obviously made to make each team equal without the hassle of having to balance class to class, faction to faction, but I really feel this was an integral element to what Battlefield is all about.

Further drawbacks include only three maps which are essentially similar to one another, and the lack of precision with aiming. But, for what it is, as a cheap 3-map arcade shooter, Battlefield 1943 is fantastic. It's the best rendition of the older version and captures the casual element that makes you feel tremendously nostalgic for the original. But why can't we have more depth and development in our new renditions of Battlefield? How many more times does it have to seem like we're flogging a dead horse? One might say that it's unfair to judge a game so harshly based on experiences or expectations you had of its passed game's bias. I say to you critics: You have been trying to cash-in on your past luck for renditions upon renditions of this franchise.

On the development side, I think that EA DICE should be looking to what comes out of their Mod community instead of focusing on conceptual archeology. Battlefield is occasionally fun, but truly feels tired. The love that someone gives a modification like Desert Combat, Forgotten Hope or Project Reality makes those games infinitely more playable than this is, but the problem is that there are far few people playing those games these days to make them interesting.