Battlefield 2142

7.9
Good

Gameplay	8.5	"More of the same this time round."
Graphics	7.0
Sound	7.0
Value	7.5

By Tristan Clark

The Battlefield series is loved by many - but it’s the kind of love that has its ups and downs. Since the series’ inception with 1942, the games have contained more than their fair share of bugs. Battlefield 2 continued this dubious distinction, seemingly being released to the public without having gone through a beta phase of bug hunting. It has taken many months and many patches to get the game up to a stage it should have been at when it came out, and there have been countless cries of annoyance from the horde of fans online.

But there’s the rub – in spite of all the anger (generally directed towards EA), the fans are still playing the games. They could have easily gone off and found some other objective-oriented online FPS, but they haven’t – and that’s because the core gameplay of the Battlefield series is so damn fun. It might be surrounded by a whole heap of crap, so to speak, but the basic game of Battlefield just keeps on pulling people back.

Which brings us to Battlefield 2142, the latest in the series. As you can tell from the title, the game is set in the future – a future where most of the northern hemisphere has been covered in ice, and two factions struggle for the remaining pieces of hospitable land. As a result, the terrain is made up of browns and whites, as you fight amongst snowed-in abandoned cities or the deserted wastelands of Africa. However, Dice made a conscious decision to keep the technology available heavily grounded, so you won’t be fighting with laser guns and the like any time soon. In fact, other than the odd Mech, hover tank, or Titan, you could be forgiven for thinking that the game was set around 2016 – everything is just a little bit too familiar.

That actually sums up the majority of the game quite nicely – in almost every area, 2142 offers only minor upgrades (or no upgrades at all) to its predecessor. The same graphics engine is used, many vehicles behave similarly, and the entire interface has merely been re-skinned. As a result, this game feels more like a very well executed mod for Battlefield 2, rather than a successor in its own right. But that doesn’t matter, so long as it’s still fun, right? In essence, 2142 is Battlefield 2 with mechs; if that sounds appealing, then you’ll probably have a good time with this one.

Of course, that’s assuming the game will be playable on your computer – apart from the inexplicably long load times that still plague the series (why the hell do I have to keep having my shaders optimized? Every other game around seems to do fine without this), 2142 comes with a bunch of wonderful new bugs. You’d have thought that, seeing as this is the same engine as Battlefield 2, Dice would have worked out most of the kinks by now – but instead, it feels like a step or two backwards. Reviewing this title became a lot harder after the game started locking up my computer every time I tried to enter a multiplayer game, and apparently I’m not alone in experiencing this sort of thing – EA’s help service admits to receiving an ‘extremely high’ number of troubleshooting requests. Looks like it’ll be the same story as Battlefield 2, where people will anxiously await the next patch and hope that it doesn’t just introduce a host of new bugs.

Once you have the game running, you will find a few new things that help distinguish the game from its predecessor. The most obvious addition is the Titan mode, which pits two gigantic floating battle stations against each other. Each side must first scramble on the ground to try and capture missile silos, which are then used to rid the enemy Titan of its shields. This plays out in much the same way as the traditional Conquest mode – the difference comes in once the shields have been wiped out. Here, you must get aboard the enemy Titan and make your way down its corridors to the core reactor. If you can blow this up, you’ll have a few moments to escape before the Titan explodes. The firefights inside the Titans can be fun, and the back-and-forth nature of storming the enemy while trying to keep your own Titan secure can get quite intense. Of course, each game is only as good as the people you play it with, and right now there are many people running around with no clue about this mode.

The other feature being touted is the more extensive system of unlockables. There are only four classes, but they are much more customizable, and as you gain points (by killing people or completing objectives) you get to unlock new weapons and abilities. The downside to this is that you are forced to pick one of the classes and stick with it, at least until you garner enough points to unlock things in the other classes.

Overall, 2142 isn’t a huge step forward, and in some cases (such as stability) it’s a disappointing step back. But once again, it all comes down to the core Battlefield gameplay, which remains as fun as ever – and that’s what will keep people coming back to 2142, even as they complain bitterly (and rightfully) about things that should have been fixed during development. If you’re new to the series, you may as well pick up 2142 – it does, after all, have mechs in it. If you already have Battlefield 2, though, you may want to hold off on this one until some of the new bugs have been fixed.

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