"One of my all-time favorites."

This is version two of my review. My first review was written less than week after the game came out and I had things on there that I wish I hadn't said, so here we go.

Battlefield 1942 is a World War 2 based action game. There are many other World War 2 games out, but what makes Battlefield 1942 so unique is your ability to drive tanks, sail boats and submarines, fly airplanes, etc. This is a very long review, but it's informative. I suggest you read it before picking up this game.

Game play (10/10)- As I just stated above, the biggest appeal to most people about this game is that you can control many different vehicles. The gameplay is addicting and fun, but it seems to me that they spent more time on the vehicles than on the infantry, and infantry is my biggest gripe.

Infantry cannot sprint, which I personally think is pretty damn stupid. If you're walking in Berlin, and a tank comes around the corner and you have nowhere to hide, you're not going to march away, you're going to run for dear life. Of course you can't do it in this game, so you're kind of screwed. This becomes a huge problem with grenades. Their huge radius and one-hit kills are annoying and sometimes unavoidable since you can't sprint.

But besides infantry, everything else is cool. Flying a plane, dropping a torpedo into the water, and seeing it ram into an aircraft carrier and sink it is all too fun. Running people over with your jeep, or just being a jeep kamikaze, crashing into the first tank you see, blowing the both of you up, is too funny. Backing up your friends with a huge battleship while they capture the flags is just great. If your ship gets sunk and you have to evacuate...well, you get the point.

There are 4 different game modes, and the game is based on 16 major battles in World War 2 (D-Day, Midway, Battle of the Bulge, Stalingrad, etc). The most popular game mode is Conquest (for a good reason), where you must capture points and hold them. If you die, you can respawn on a flag that you captured, unlike Day of Defeat. About 90% of all servers run the conquest mode. The other game types include capture the flag, co-op (where you just fight with humans against bots, nothing special and it's extremely laggy), and Team Deathmatch, where you pretty much just kill your opponents. Not as exciting as Conquest.

Game play is very versatile; fighting in Midway is nothing at all like fighting in Stalingrad or Kharkov. While you're on the land storming a Japanese airfield in Iwo Jima, you may have pilots supporting you overhead, bombing anti-aircraft guns and tanks, while maybe even having a battleship back you up. Anything you can think of, you can do.

Story (4/10)- It's based on World War 2, which is a whole story line in itself. However, the single player has no more than briefings in the campaign mode, which I recommend you don't play anyway. That's the entire story thrown into the game, so therefore it's only a four out of ten.

Graphics (9/10)- Graphics get better with every game I get, with only a few exceptions. This game is definitely not an exception. Characters look more believable than I have ever seen on any other video game ever. The textures are awesome. The maps are so well done, graphic wise, and just go great with the rest of the game. The only problem is that you need a pretty good computer to run the game at a good framerate and with decent picture quality.

The engine is very good. If your computer is good, it will get a good frame rate, unlike some other games I will not mention, such as Morrowind. Oops.

Sound (9/10)- Well, there's about three songs in the entire game, and they sound decent, as far as games go. The sounds picked for the vehicles, bombs, etc, are well picked. There's nothing better than having a rocket whiz right by your head.

In my first review I complained that there is no background noise. There is SOME background noise, such as desert winds in El Alamein, but not much more. You really don't need background noise, however, since this game IS your background noise. Grenades flying, tank shells bursting, bombs dropping, artillery exploding, guns pounding, etc, all are part of this game's sounds, and they sound great.

Single player (5/10)- Don't buy this game unless you have the a DSL line or better. Single player is just plain awful. It's pretty much multiplayer only with computer AI (bots), and they can REALLY slow the game down. Unless you have a very powerful computer, it will become a slideshow with any decent amount of bots in the game.

Even if you can take the slideshow, they're not all that great anyway. They don't get stuck like in most games, but they are stupid, boring, and have no teamwork. They use anti-tanks the way people use snipers, and often are caught running around doing nothing rather than capturing control points. The ''campaign'' mode is not a campaign at all, it just goes through the maps with bots thrown in. Instant battle is the same, only you get to pick the map.

Multi player (9/10)- Incredible. There is so much more teamwork in this game than in Counter-Strike. If you drive a tank, it's likely that someone will come in the tank with you and man the gun. People seem to stick together a lot. The netcode is good, not great, but it can handle 32-40 players quite well on a good server. Most of the lag you might get on a 32 player server will be the server itself, not the game's netcode. The best way to avoid multiplayer problems is to play on EA official servers, which hardly ever slow down or give problems. This game has GameSpy built in, so it's easy to find games.

Replayability (10/10)- I've had this game since the day it came out and I have never ever doubted it. I've seen it as something to do just about every night since the day I first bought it, and I seriously doubt it'll be replaced for a LONG time.

There are also ''mods'' (programs that modify the game) being created for this game. The most notable one is called Desert Combat, which takes place in the Persian Gulf War. This mod is very popular and is played by many, many people online.

Final (9/10)- I'm not naive enough to give this game a 10/10. Just because I love this game doesn't mean I can't recognize that it has a few problems. I can promise you this, though: If you buy this game and have a good connection, you will enjoy it.

And that's that. This game is so popular for two main reasons: it's innovative, and anyone can play it. Other sites tell of webmasters from console and real time strategy sites getting together for a huge LAN party, because it's that easy to pick up and play. Whether you like action games or just love video games in general, you need to pick this game up. If you decide to purchase this game, I wrote a Strategy Guide on this same site that you should check out.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 09/15/02, Updated 04/21/03