Battlefield 1943 (PS3) Demo Impressions

It’s rare that I’ll boot up a game and almost immediately go; ‘œthis is complete crap!’  Battlefield 1943 is just such a game.  Usually my distaste for a game will gently brew over a series of gaming sessions.  Not this time.  Despite my rather negative bent on things in general, I am a social service worker by profession after all; I actually do try to give games the benefit of the doubt.  But Battlefield 1943 is one of the more annoying experiences I’ve had on-line in quite a while.

The demo for the downloadable FPS, multiplayer-only, Battlefield 1943 dropped recently and it allows the player to experience thirty minutes of game-play for free before you are made to purchase the full game.  All of my matches in the demo were on Wake Island and I only played ‘œquick-matches.’  I have a lot of friends who picked this up early and could have jumped into squads of people I know but I chose to stick with the quick-matches for the purpose of this ‘œimpressions’ piece.

I have played this on the PS3, which did not have the server problems that XBL experienced during the first week.  However, XBL subscribers are picking up speed; at the time of printing they achieved the 43 million kills necessary to unlock another map before the PS3.

So, what is the source of the suckage you ask?  Are the graphics weak?  Well no actually, for a downloadable shooter the game’s appearances are acceptable, if not lacking in some kind of creative aesthetic.  Are the controls or the game broken, or unserviceable?  Nope either.  Personally I find the controls a bit too sensitive but after a few minutes I could usually hit what I was aiming at.  The primary issues for me revolve around how play seems intentionally designed to reward weasels, and pricing.

In Killzone 2, grenade cookers: those that would camp and then cook grenades before running into a crowd of opponents, are usually berated out of matches because that kind of bullshit just ruins a match for everyone involved.  In Battlefield, mounting explosives on jeeps, driving at a group of opponents, then jumping off and detonating is fairly common place.  Kamikaze actions with the planes are also regular occurrences.  The key to one’s experience in 1943 is to have a decent friend’s list of people playing this game.  If you jump into open matches you need to accept that there are few, if any, incentives to work with a team, and not many actually do so.  It’s ironic that players are encouraged to squad up, and yet this offers almost no benefit to the player.

If you are familiar with the Battlefield series then this might be a game you can enjoy/exploit.  In my games, I came across several players who were racking up hundred of points but only getting 1 or 2 kills during an entire match.  Obviously I’m new to Battlefield and don’t know the tricks, and frankly I’m not likely to buy the full version with balancing, or unbalancing like this game has.  Clearly there are plenty of people playing this game and enjoying it; however, as a demo I find it hard to believe that newcomers to the Battlefield franchises would find this to be an attractive title.

Finally, spawning on the aircraft carriers is a complete waste of time.  Many players just wait for planes to spawn, which can take a while, and then they all cannibalize each other like wretched little children going for the planes.  It’s completely mental.  Ironically, spawn camping on the carriers is encouraged. I probably spent ten of my thirty minutes of demo time just respawning on the carrier, trying to get to a plane and then being killed just as I was literally ten feet off of the carrier.  It is also a possibility that when you spawn, there is no way to get to the shore because the boats and planes are all gone.  A friend told me that you could swim but I never tried that during my demo experience, and honestly that just sounds stupid due to the distance from the shore.  On a personal note, I literally had some cheap piece of shit on my own team, mounted on top of a plane I finally got to before anyone else, shooting me to get my plane.

The pricepoint for Battlefield 1943 really feels a bit on the high side for me.  Pricing for four maps with cosmetic upgrades and limited game features is as follows; 1200 MS Points/$14.99/£9.99/12.99 Euros. Battlefield 1943 is a game for scrubs to help pass the time until Modern Warfare 2 drops.

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