"In single player it is just a game, but in mutliplayer......IT IS A LEGEND!!"

This is a game that sort of snuck up on us all, it was announced, then very little was heard, and i personally had assumed it to have fallen off the end of the earth till boom, a copy lands in my lap!

This game is not without its faults, its optimisation is some of the worst ive seen in a long time, this game CAN be played on the recommended spec, with decent frames even, but it isnt going to do it all for you! No way, if you want this to work right, you either upgrade your graphics card to at LEAST a GF 4 Ti 4200, or you optimise it.

Most people will tell you that it is impossible to get good frames on a PC with low spec, this is not true, it is however uncommon, i personally have played this game on an AthlonXP 1600+ with a GF2 MX 200 32MB Graphics card at around 40FPS.

Now to the review proper:

Sound: - 9: Impressive, very impressive, the explosions all sound very realistic, the voice acting is only used for commands and as such gets old quick but is at least quality. Most immpressive of all are the tanks and other vehicles in the game, they sound so real you can almost feel the judder of your M-64 as you plow through a tirade of enemy soldiers.

Graphics: - 9 This game is proberbly the prettiest PC game ive ever seen [Read: Prettiest game ive ever seen PERIOD], again the skinning of the vehicles is top notch, as are the textures on buildings and surroundings. However there is one thing stopping this game from getting a 10. The explosions are very poor, particularly for things such as Mortar fire, or grenades, on my GF4 Ti 4200 128 they heardly even seemed like explosions, rather more like soil being blown into the air by an unknown force. This was also the case on the 2 other PCs ive tried it on.

Gameplay: - 10 Breathtaking, simply breathtaking, the sheer scale of the battles taking place on this game leave you with a true sence of awe the first time you see them, maps cover huge areas, and are typically as realistic as a game should ever need to get! It is this scale and freedom that makes mutliplayer so addictive on this game, imagine it, 64 players, duking it out, with a massive arsenal available to them, accross a map the size of a moderate size village! Very impressive.

Story: - 0

This is where the game truely dies, there is a single player, however it is nothing more than a bunch of levels bundled together with a little historical reference in the loading screen, nothing more, i would have loved a MOHAA or RTCW style single player mode using the game style of BF1942, but nooooooo instead they give you a bunch of missions that rarely seem like they have any purpose together, or that they are part of any larger purpose.
The single player of this game gives it very poor replay value. It is the multiplayer that excels.

Overall: - 9

This game is one of the most immpressive ones ive seen in a lot of years, when i saw the scale of the game, i remember thinking i hadnt been this impressed with a game since a young Half Life came onto the scene all those years ago.
Ignore the paltry nature of the single player and jump straight into the beauty of multiplayer, but beware you will NOT be running this game on 56K internet.
The servers have larger capacitys than usual due to the larger scale of the game, meaning more lag.

Rent or Buy - If you have dial up, possibly rent for the single player but i doubt it, if you have BB buy for the multiplayer.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 05/22/03, Updated 05/22/03