The Good

The game is fun. It has all the classic elements of Battlefield combat: land, sea, and air vehicles mashed in with a large ground-based capture the flag maps. Another huge plus is that the game is only $15. I think that this is a great step in the right direction. I hope it sends a message to game publishers that you can publish a game that might not look the best or be game of the year but if it’s fun and cheap people will buy it.

They are also doing a challenge where the community unlocks new content by getting a large number of global kills. At 43,000,000 kills the respective system (Xbox360 or PS3) unlocked the Coral Bay map (which is an air-combat only map). This REALLY incentivized people to get on as much as possible and keep the fight going 24/7. Editors Note: Both systems have unlocked Coral Bay, although the Xbox 360 was the first to do so.

The Bad

This game is slow. While I enjoy playing it, I never get really passionate about it like I do COD4 or TF2. You have no sense of teamwork, or team goals, which is a problem in a game centered around team and squad based objectives. You basically run around capping points, trying to kill the enemy. When the game is over you are never really surprised about who won, because you have no clue what is going on elsewhere in the match.

The game in general seems very non-immersive. When I shoot my gun or run around I don’t FEEL like a soldier on a battlefield. I almost feel like I’m playing a rail shooter in an arcade.

When I hopped back into COD4 after playing this game for a couple reasons, I realized why COD4 is SO GOOD. When you run the camera moves around like I’m running, when I shoot my gun the camera makes me feel like I’m actually shooting a rifle, Battlefield 1943 just doesn’t do that.

The Down-Low

This game is fun and cheap, plain and simple. As you can tell, it wasn’t the best game I’ve ever played by any stretch of the imagination but it keeps me entertained and got me to pry open my wallet instead of GameFly’ing it like I do most games.

Bullet-Tooth Tony and I have a habit of sitting around my apartment, drinking, playing classic Nintendo games on my Wii while we proceed to get drunk (fun, eh?). So last weekend we thought this would be a great throw-back game for our classic gaming ritual but after playing for something like 2 hours we had only beaten two robots (I also again must confess, both of the defeated foes were the work of Tony).

I’ll confess I bought this off of WiiWare. While I usually evangelize the Xbox360 as the console to beat, I hate hate hate hate the D-pad on the 360 controller. A d-pad needs up, down, left and right and when you are playing classic games on a d-pad with diagnals (like Bionic Commando: Rearmed) it just screws things up.

So pick this game up from your favorite game dispenser and give Capcom the money they deserve for giving us new content in a familiar format!!!

*Now, disclaimer time, I routinely was behind the times as a child. While I did have a Nintendo Entertainment System, I rarely got new games and when I did they were gifts from family members who had no clue what the “hip” and “happening” games were, so I played Mega Man first in my late teens via an emulator.