"Excellent game"

Battlefield: 1942 is a FPS (First Person Shooter) based around WWII. It also has an online capability which really gives this game a good level of enjoyment. It is probably the only game where you can take off in an airplane, fly over the enemy base, bomb a target, parachute out, get in a tank and start blowing stuff up within a span of 2 minutes.

You can choose from 4 different armies, 2 axis and 2 allied. US and British for the allies and German and Japanese for the axis. These four armies are all equally matched and have their own unique weapons that are both historically accurate and give both sides an equal chance. In single player mode you have the chance to play a campaign for either the axis or the allies. You battle in many different arenas and theatres. They are Pacific, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and Western Europe. Each of these has a distinctly different feel to them. You are given the chance to play in a couple dozen individual battles.

The ticket system is quite ingenious. Each team begins the battle with a certain number of points called “tickets”. A team loses tickets when one of their members dies. The rate at which they lose tickets is determined by the amount of spawn points or control points you have under your control. When a team’s ticket number reaches zero the battle ends.

There are two basic modes of play. Conquest is where you go around killing and capturing control points in order to win the battle. The second is Capture the Flag. This is where you have to get into the enemies base, steal their flag, and get back to your base. This is quite difficult so you have to work as a team in order to do this, because often you will die without backup.

The enemy AI is terrible. You can stand right in front of your enemy and they won’t even fire. They practically bind their own hands and stand up against the wall for you. So it is usually more fun to play in multiplayer.

Multiplayer is the best feature of this game. It pits you against human enemies who actually work with you and present a formidable challenge. You hook up with a sever that is playing on the map that you want with a number of players that you enjoy to play with and then you are instantly put into the middle of the battle. The servers can support as many as 64 players, when this happens you can get a quite intense battle going, although it could quickly become a slaughter if one team is has the better players.

The graphics are OK. They are exceptionally good in some places but the ground textures and other things just seem poorly designed. Blood splatters out of an enemy when you shoot him, explosions darken the ground, and sandbags empty when they are shot.

The sound is good. Nothing to brag about but it is good. The sound cuts out every once in a while for certain sound effects when there is a large and intense battle going on but it is only mildly annoying. The music for the game is very fitting for the game and it doesn’t get annoying like most other games.

In this game you are given the opportunity to fly airplanes, drive tanks and jeeps. The airplanes are relatively simple to fly which allows you to get used to flying in a short period of time. This is probably the most fun part of the game.

There are 5 different battle classes that you can be. Scouts call in artillery targets and snipe out enemies who were dumb enough to stop moving. Assault class is the class that is used to take out foot soldiers, this is probably the most common class. Anti-tanks are equipped with a rocket launcher that is used to blow up tanks and jeeps, and the occasional airplane. Medics are equipped with a first aid kit to heal soldiers in the midst of battle and are given a nice compact sub-machine gun. Engineers are the most useful class because they are equipped with a demolition pack, a heap of landmines, a powerful rifle, and they can fix all types of vehicles, so an engineer can repair a tank while it is attacking another one, but the tank that he is repairing will come out on top because he is being repaired as he loses his health.

Here are my final scores,

Gameplay- 10

Sound- 7

Graphics- 7

Replayability- 10

Final score- 9/10

Final recommendation- Buy! This is worth it solely for the multiplayer capabilities. You will have a lot of fun with this.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 07/06/03, Updated 07/06/03