Negative Gamer Review: Battlefield 1943 (XBLA)

The only thing Battlefield 1943 achieves is the lining off EA’s pockets and parallel failure. The later being the state in which a game fails to achieve success on nearly every conceivable level simultaneously.

Battlefield 1943 is a class based multiplayer only FPS putting you into the Pacific during WW2. The Americans and the Japanese are fighting it out over a few small islands. Each game is set on one island and sees you using your basic guns, grenades, tanks, Jeeps and planes to control the majority of the island. The team who has majority of the island under their control erodes away the enemies respawn tickets faster. Whichever side runs out of respawns first looses.

As this is a first person shooter it has an XP system and small awards, but these are little more than forgettable trinkets. The game also has an Air Superiority mode which is similar to the main mode, only it’s entirely dogfighting in planes.

Who needs a team? Gotta’ kill those damn japs!

The first stumbling block anybody will hit when starting Battlefield 1943 is the game’s reliance on teamwork. As you are only one soldier fighting on some quite large islands, it’s nearly impossible for you to make up for a poorly performing team. Even if you can capture points single handedly, if your team is not up to scratch they will lose them far faster than you can get them back. With this being online gaming, most of the people you meet will be terrible at the game. They won’t come close to your level of skill and more often than not you will be at a loss for words over their never ending barrage of dumb.

Where this really kicks you in the nuts is at the very start of every game. On some maps the first spawn point is on a carrier ship. The vessel comes equipped with two planes and four boats. Planes can only fit one person in at a time, so are usually taken right away leaving you with a bunch of other guys and some boats. A simple task right? Wrong. Frequently you will see boats leaving with just one person on board, for no other reason than the guy who got in first doesn’t want to wait the three seconds it would take for other people to get in. This means you can either swim to the island (which takes ages) or sit and wait for more transport to spawn. Why the game doesn’t have some way, any way, to stop this from happening is beyond me.

Often, somebody on your team will be acting like a moron. Whilst you can’t shoot somebody on your team to kill them, you can very much piss them off. In roughly one in ten games I’ve played, there will be somebody on my team who sits at the plane spawn point, just to destroy it before anybody can get in. Why? Who knows, the important thing is you can’t vote to kick out people who are being trolls. You do however get auto-kicked if you don’t spawn within 45 seconds of the game starting. Which, if you’re writing a review whilst playing a game, is very frustrating.

Is this retro yet?

It’s a WW2 shooter, it’ll happily let you spawn in a place where you will instantly die and spawn camping itself is rife. It feels sometimes like you have been thrown back seven or eight years in FPS evolution. This feeling isn’t helped by the fact all the maps you play on are taken from the game 1943 is the squeal of; 1942.

And by ‘œall the maps’ I mean three. For now. As this is EA and hints have been dropped already, it seems quite obvious that you’re going to be paying much more over the next few months if you want to keep up to date with your maps. There are plenty of other maps on the previous battlefield games that I’m sure could be updated to use the game without much hassle. Though perhaps complaining about things that’ll be added to the game in future isn’t too fair. So, back to complaining about things that are in the game.

Another aspect to the game that harkens back to the good ol’ days is the lag the game has. Whilst it’s very good at covering for it, when you get close to an enemy or are engaged in very fine precision shoot-outs, it all becomes glaringly clear. Being stabbed whilst several meters away from an opponent consistently being one of the most obvious examples. You end up just running at your opponent, knife flailing, with some vague sense of purpose and hope. Your death always takes about half a second to register at your end, which, in high pressure times, is more than a touch annoying.

Hey look, more crap to deal with!

Xbox Live is a fully working system for you to use when gaming online. Only apparently it’s not good enough for EA who insist you hand over your data to them via their EA Online system, as well as Xbox Live, to play. The sign-up process is dodgy, unreliable and badly designed. Trying to use an already in use email? Go right back to the start, with a nice message giving no indication as to the error.

The lack of communication continues into the game when every Tuesday morning the game is unplayable. Nothing in the game helps you find out why, and if you care enough to go rooting around in the official forums, you find they do server upgrades on Tuesday morning. Thanks for the heads up.

The game has no manual, and no way to quickly drop out of a game or pause. If you don’t know the controls, tough luck. And if you want to look them up before the start of a game, you better be quick, remember that 45 second auto-kick. But not all is lost; hidden away in the menu there is an offline tutorial. Only to get to latter parts of the tutorial, like flying practice, you’re forced to go through the basics of a first person game, every single time.

After a game, if you want to quit and go play something else, or maybe just back out to the game’s title screen, for some reason you’re not allowed. You have to wait for the next game to be completely loaded and set up before you can quit. This results in many players on both teams dropping out of a game just as it starts. Hardly a useful set up.

A few other points worth mentioning:

• The price tag on the Xbox is 1200 Microsoft points, which is not a denomination the points cards actually come in. Thus expect to fork over for a 2100 point card.
• The game has some nice in-game awards, but some terrible real Xbox achievements. None are challenging and some seem designed to cause grief on your team. The ‘œuse your parachute’ achievement just results in people taking a plane, getting some altitude and bailing out. Great.
• The game, as with most World War games, trivialises war. Even more so than usual as there isn’t a hint at plot or repercussions of any kind. The World War setting could easily be replaced with anything else.
• The voice chat system is not team-wide, to talk to people you have to be in their squad. If somebody’s not in your squad, you can’t communicate with them at all.

The game is classic Battlefield and more of a remake than a sequel. Annoying game mechanics and a small amount of content make it very understandable why the game has a budget price tag. With its over reliance on team work and an inability to customise your classes the game’s fun crumbles away unless you have friends to help you. But if you’re the kind of gamer to have friends you play with regularly, you’re probably already playing a better game.

You should play this game if’¦

… you want to spend your money on a game you have already played.

Final Score
A generic feeling class based fps with cliché annoyances and an over-reliance on teamwork.

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