"Very good game"

GAMEPLAY:

This game has extremely good playability and gameplay. There are different modes of play like conquest, capture the flag, and co-op. It all pretty much boils down to two teams fighting over objectives. There are different weapons for each side. Vehicles are liberally put over every map, with land, sea and air vehicles. For the land vehicles, the allied range is a jeep, APC, sherman light tank and M10 heavy tank killer. The sea range for the Allies are battleships, destroyers (with depth charges), aircraft carriers and higgins boats. In the air, the Allies get the SBD dauntless dive bomber, torpedo bombers, F4 corsairs and the B17 flying fortress (which has a top gunner and ball gunner). The single player gameplay isn't that great you fight in a campaign over all the maps with bots, essentially practice for multi player. The multi player is the reason to get this game and you need broadband capabilities to play with a reasonable ping. Most servers run the conquest game mode, but you can apply filters to find a co-op or CTF game if you want to. Once on a server you will either play with people that play as a team, or a bunch of mindless jerks who will ruin the game by team killing. If you find a good server, then you can pilot the full range of vehicles and do things such as storm the beach with a full higgins boat on the Omaha Beach map, dogfight with planes, mow down infantry with mounted machine guns and the list goes on.

STORY:

Basically, it is world war II, and you are fighting different battles on different servers without them being connected. In single player campaign mode, the missions are linked, but failure in one mission will not affect the next. You are basically reenacting battles of World War two, since every map is a place where a battle ocurred.

AUDIO/VIDEO:

The graphics are very good if you have the computer to run them, but even if you don't they will be serviceable. This game is/was plagued with audio problems, ranging to the infamous ''machine gun loop'' bug to the orders your character shouts out sounding like garbled code. The audio effects in the game are excellent, bullets whizzing past your head, artillery shells screaming in to blow up almost on top of you and tanks rolling in and blasting everything away. Sadly, there is almost no music in the game, just one song while the game is loading and that's it.

REPLAYABILITY:

Almost limitless replay value. You can pick any server any time and the action is thrilling.

BUY OR RENT:

Buy now, play often. Buy it. Now.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 04/13/03, Updated 04/13/03