The year is 2142, and a new ice age has turned most of europe into uninhabitable arctic tundra. This has caused the EU and the newly formed Pan Asian Coelition to begin fighting over habitable land. Massive ships previously used to evacuate civilians have been converted into mobile assault bases, and war has begun.
The game consists of combined arms fighting over large maps, involving tanks, infantry, aircraft and the awesome Battle Walkers. There are two modes of play, one, conquest, involves holding strategic points of land causing your oponents reinforcement tickets to drain. This mode will be farmiliar to anyone that has played any of the previous Battlefield games. A new mode is titan mode,where each team has a massive mobile base, with guns, and a dock for aircraft. The two teams fight for control over missile silos, in an attempt to bring down the enemy titans shield, at which point it is boarded, and control panels are destroyed untill the reactor core is open. Once destroyed, the game is over.
Combat is pretty standard, with 4 classes, Recon (A sniper/spec ops combined class) Assualt, who as well as being the main combat force on the field, also function as medics. Then there is the engineer, who can repair vehicles, as well as carrying a hefty anti armour weapon. Finally there is the Support class, who carrys a light machine gun, which in an interesting twist, gets acurate the longer you fire it for. He also carrys around spare ammunition.
The fighting is really fast paced, especially on the titan, but some of the guns could be a little more accurate. Tank combat is interesting, as one sides tank can hover, thus being able to side straif, but cannot revolve its turret. The other is standard tank tracks, and can revolve its turret.
An interesting idea is that of the active defence counter measure, which is a shield, mounted on the heavier vehicles, and on planes, which you can activate for a small amout of time and makes your vehicle impervious to damage.
An other great thing is the unlocks system, which adds an almost RPGesque dynamic to the game, as you customise your character to suit your needs.
Sound in the game is great, the guns sound visceral, and meaty. The tanks and planes also have a distinct noise to them. If you are in a quiet spot of the map, you can often hear distant combat, which is very atmospheric. The sound track (which you only hear on the menu and loading screens) is also very nice. I have even encoded the sound track into MP3 so I can listen to it on my MP3 player.
The graphics are not that bad, with sharp textures, and interesting details. The maps are a bit colourless though, most maps are either icy colours or deserty colours. There is an odd bloom effect that while strange, seems somehow fitting. Unfortunatly, even though this game does not have the graphical fidelity of current titles, you still need a fairly decent system to get the most out of it.
Since the game is supposed to be based around team play, I may as well say a little on it. At the moment, there are still many that play "lone wolf" without a squad, but I think as soon as the majority of people realise you can get nearly double the points by being in a squad (you get bonus points for killing and such inside order radiuses) there will be a lot of team play going on. Giving orders is really easy too, you just point at the icon for the silo or flag, and press T and click. Then everyone on your squad gets an "attack here" message.
At the moment there are a few bugs, for instance when the titan is moving, the game gets quite laggy inside the titan. Also, many users are reporting being kicked from the game, when they lose connection of the EA master server. There are also problems (at release) with unlocks taking a while to register, but EA has put this down to larger than predicted server load. Also, some people are worried about the card that comes with the game, mentioning ingame advertisements. (Some people have misinterpreted it as that it reads your browsing history. This is false. See http://support.ea.com/cgi-bin/ea.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_sid=ErFgZzki&p_faqid=14211 for more info.)
To sum up, it is bloody good fun if you get a friend or two on a teamspeak server, and one of my favorite multiplayer games. I would give it 8/10
The above was written for an other website.
Just so you know, I still play RO, but sometimes I want some arcady action, instead of realism. I just wish you guys would get over yourselves, you treat the BF series like an insult to your inteligence. It is arcady fun, it makes no qualms about this, what with pods that can shoot a player half way across the map, and big stompy robots.
Oh, and about the adverts: I really hope someone gets sued for all the libelus crap some sites have spewed about the BF2142 ad system. It DOES NOT look at what you browse at. What it records is this:
Your IP
How big the ads are on your screen, and what angle you are at
What country you are in, so the adverts are targeted at your country.
Anyway, what do you guys think of the game (if you have played it) and what do you think of my review, considering it is the first I have written.
The game consists of combined arms fighting over large maps, involving tanks, infantry, aircraft and the awesome Battle Walkers. There are two modes of play, one, conquest, involves holding strategic points of land causing your oponents reinforcement tickets to drain. This mode will be farmiliar to anyone that has played any of the previous Battlefield games. A new mode is titan mode,where each team has a massive mobile base, with guns, and a dock for aircraft. The two teams fight for control over missile silos, in an attempt to bring down the enemy titans shield, at which point it is boarded, and control panels are destroyed untill the reactor core is open. Once destroyed, the game is over.
Combat is pretty standard, with 4 classes, Recon (A sniper/spec ops combined class) Assualt, who as well as being the main combat force on the field, also function as medics. Then there is the engineer, who can repair vehicles, as well as carrying a hefty anti armour weapon. Finally there is the Support class, who carrys a light machine gun, which in an interesting twist, gets acurate the longer you fire it for. He also carrys around spare ammunition.
The fighting is really fast paced, especially on the titan, but some of the guns could be a little more accurate. Tank combat is interesting, as one sides tank can hover, thus being able to side straif, but cannot revolve its turret. The other is standard tank tracks, and can revolve its turret.
An interesting idea is that of the active defence counter measure, which is a shield, mounted on the heavier vehicles, and on planes, which you can activate for a small amout of time and makes your vehicle impervious to damage.
An other great thing is the unlocks system, which adds an almost RPGesque dynamic to the game, as you customise your character to suit your needs.
Sound in the game is great, the guns sound visceral, and meaty. The tanks and planes also have a distinct noise to them. If you are in a quiet spot of the map, you can often hear distant combat, which is very atmospheric. The sound track (which you only hear on the menu and loading screens) is also very nice. I have even encoded the sound track into MP3 so I can listen to it on my MP3 player.
The graphics are not that bad, with sharp textures, and interesting details. The maps are a bit colourless though, most maps are either icy colours or deserty colours. There is an odd bloom effect that while strange, seems somehow fitting. Unfortunatly, even though this game does not have the graphical fidelity of current titles, you still need a fairly decent system to get the most out of it.
Since the game is supposed to be based around team play, I may as well say a little on it. At the moment, there are still many that play "lone wolf" without a squad, but I think as soon as the majority of people realise you can get nearly double the points by being in a squad (you get bonus points for killing and such inside order radiuses) there will be a lot of team play going on. Giving orders is really easy too, you just point at the icon for the silo or flag, and press T and click. Then everyone on your squad gets an "attack here" message.
At the moment there are a few bugs, for instance when the titan is moving, the game gets quite laggy inside the titan. Also, many users are reporting being kicked from the game, when they lose connection of the EA master server. There are also problems (at release) with unlocks taking a while to register, but EA has put this down to larger than predicted server load. Also, some people are worried about the card that comes with the game, mentioning ingame advertisements. (Some people have misinterpreted it as that it reads your browsing history. This is false. See http://support.ea.com/cgi-bin/ea.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_sid=ErFgZzki&p_faqid=14211 for more info.)
To sum up, it is bloody good fun if you get a friend or two on a teamspeak server, and one of my favorite multiplayer games. I would give it 8/10
The above was written for an other website.
Just so you know, I still play RO, but sometimes I want some arcady action, instead of realism. I just wish you guys would get over yourselves, you treat the BF series like an insult to your inteligence. It is arcady fun, it makes no qualms about this, what with pods that can shoot a player half way across the map, and big stompy robots.
Oh, and about the adverts: I really hope someone gets sued for all the libelus crap some sites have spewed about the BF2142 ad system. It DOES NOT look at what you browse at. What it records is this:
Your IP
How big the ads are on your screen, and what angle you are at
What country you are in, so the adverts are targeted at your country.
Anyway, what do you guys think of the game (if you have played it) and what do you think of my review, considering it is the first I have written.