This year I grew a little as a gamer. I took on two of my most feared game genres and stuck it out long enough to become competent playing them. In April, I purchased an arcade stick and finally learned how to play Street Fighter. But it wasn’t until mid-July that I moved on to the next one on my list: an online-only multiplayer shooter.

I own the Orange Box but I’ve never booted up Team Fortress 2. Growing up in the Nintendo 64 era, I experienced firsthand the impenetrable GoldenEye. I had some not-so-nice friends that were far better than I, completely discouraging me from playing first person shooters. So, with the exception of reviewing, I never spent a serious amount of time in a competitive multiplayer mode of a FPS, let alone dabbling in an online-only game.

But when I got the chance to review Battlefield: 1943, I swallowed my fears, tried to conjure up the feeling of the first time I beat Seth (in SFIV) and jumped in feet first. And, besides a few server hiccups, I’m sincerely glad I did.

Gameplay

Battlefield: 1943 is an online multiplayer FPS for both the Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network. Essentially, it’s a stripped down version of Battlefield 1942, an online-only shooter developed by DICE from a few years back. To take the Battlefield combat to consoles, however, multiplayer wizards DICE stripped out some of the depth in the guns, vehicles and player classes.

It may sound like you’re missing out on something by playing 1943, but really, this is a true-to-form Battlefield game and the simplicity is a actually a selling point rather than a major flaw. Unlike previous PC incarnations of Battlefield, 1943 is very accessible and easy to pick up and play.

The many classes have been amalgamated into three. There are Infantry, Rifleman and Sniper classes, which are played for close combat, intermediate and long range respectively.


The diversity between the classes and figuring out the best way to use them is what makes Battlefield: 1943 so exciting and dynamic. When your team starts really working together and finding out where each person can help best and in which class they can do the most damage, each person and every skill level can contribute to the match. However, to that end, if you’re on a team that is inexperienced, or worse, emotional, it can feel like you’re smashing your head against a brick wall.

My only issues with the game should really be temporary ones (I hope!). I got lucky, in a way, because I didn’t attempt to play the game in the first couple of days and only hopped on the weekend after it launched.

I didn’t suffer through the well-documented server issues in the first couple of days, but was able to jump into a relatively lag-free game my first couple of tries. That said, a handful of times I had really bad server lag that felt like my controller was broken. Whenever I wasn’t pushing forward, my soldier would constantly slide backwards, as if the server hadn’t caught up to where I was and was constantly trying to back me up. Because of that, I was killed a lot when I was pretty sure I’d outrun that bullet or hidden from that tank.

Occasionally I was even booted from a game mid-match, unable to rejoin the game or even connect to the EA servers. This would have been unforgivable if it had become a trend but thankfully most of my time playing BF: 1943 was less eventful.

The good news is that EA has a proven history of having rough starts but providing great support for their online. The bad is that it may hurt the overall numbers of people who stick with the game and whether it will be playable in the next couple of months. If the online community continues to experience these issues, it’s more than likely that they’ll gravitate back to older games or jump into the next Call of Duty when it comes out in the fall.


One of the best parts of BF:1943 is teaming up with three other friends in a squad. Sadly, I didn’t get to try that out very much, as there weren’t a lot of people on my friends list who bought the game, but when you play in a squad, all four of you enter a match together, can spawn near each other when you die and share a private voice chat channel. It’s much more fun riding in tanks and jeeps together, capturing flags as a four-man death squad and keeping the action organized with private chat. The sad part is, squad mode was the most broken part of the game at the outset and the biggest disappointment so far. If this becomes more stable and teammates don’t get split onto separate teams in the second match, or dropped completely, and there’s incentive for players to keep playing BF: 1943 instead of other shooters (like another DLC unlock challenge like the 43 million kills) the game will only get better down the road.

Outside of squad play, however, it’s a pretty quiet affair with very little headset chatter and sometimes, because of that, very little organization. It’s a tossup most matches as to whether that can make your experience worse, but I still found a lot to like.

Graphics and Sound

Battlefield: 1943 uses the physics engine from the Battlefield: Bad Company games and really benefits from it. Most buildings are completely destructible and the graphical fidelity is pretty decent for a downloadable game.


The sound is pretty fantastic in 1943, and the weapon reports sound realistic. The music can really add to the excitement in matches when it syncs up with the onscreen action.

There are orchestral swells when you capture flag points and auditory cues that mark a kill or a shot down plane.

Value

There’s a lot of fun to be had with BF: 1943 and your only limit being who you’re paired up with online. That said, however, there is a distinct lack of map diversity (even with the fourth one being unlocked in the XBLA version so quickly) and it can get frustrating at times when you can’t spawn without being quickly killed as you step out from a hut.


With a little more DLC and possibly some more community challenges like the first week, the 43 million kill’s one, there may be a lot more BF there to be enjoyed. But with Modern Warfare 2 and other online shooters coming out this fall, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether the servers will still be as populated in a few months. At the moment, however, there are few $15 arcade games that are more worth your gaming dollar.

Conclusion

What BF:1943 lacks in depth compared to earlier Battlefield games, it makes up for in a simplistic and challenging multiplayer game. Twenty-four person matches feel fantastic and except for the odd laggy match, it’s a seamless and fun experience. If you can get together a squad, there isn’t a more fun FPS online experience for your money.