Whilst there’s no official clan support you can hold private games and you can set up groups within each team, in which you’ll be able to hear everyone in your particular section. The few games we had last night were much more successful when we all communicated, so invest in one this morning before the game releases this afternoon and we’ll all love you much more for it. Whilst you can set markers (that will appear on the HUD of your teammates) and on-screen text prompts will alert others when your character can see an enemy soldier, vehicle or airplane, to properly succeed as a team you’ll need to be headset-equipped. It works a little like the highway races on Tokyo Challenge, although I’ve probably even lost more people by saying that – essentially this isn’t a team deathmatch game but one where you need to co-ordinate attacks and hold positions to win. Conquest involves both teams battling it out for five checkpoints dotted evenly around the map – hold these checkpoints and your flag will raise, and the more flags you have hoisted over the other team the faster their reserves will run dry. Likewise, there’s only one mode of play – the classic Conquest – but as this is the mode that most people play on Battlefield titles anyway we didn’t expect anything else. They’ve all had an overhaul with certain sections playing and looking differently and all are superbly tweaked to provide maximum enjoyment over time. The number of levels too has been trimmed – there are now just three Pacific based battlegrounds on which the Americans and Japanese fight it out, and all should be familiar to fans of the previous game: Wake Island, Guadalcanal, and Iwo Jima. Whilst there’s a rank system in place unlike similar games the classes don’t improve their weaponry as they amass points. Each class carries a couple of weapons along with an alt or a melee, and you can flick between them on the battlefield by picking up the relevant backpack from a downed soldier. 1943 has been trimmed down to three classes – a long range scout (with sniper rifle and demo charges), a mid range rifleman (with rifle and rocket propelled grenades) and a quicker short range infantryman with hand grenades. To the unfamiliar, and if you haven’t read our hands-on from yesterday, Battlefield 1943 is a pseudo-sequel to Battlefield 1942, a PC-based first person shooter, although one that’s been at the gym and lost most of the fat from it’s older brother. So, assuming that EA’s dedicated network holds up, we can put all the worries and issues that the 360 gamers had yesterday to one side, and let’s go back to the game. We had a couple of team games last night amongst ourselves and then against GOON!NE and The Lost Gamer and had a complete blast. The game is completely lag-free, voice chat was a pleasure and joining and inviting games, once we realised you don’t do it via the XMB message but via the triangle button in-game, was hassle-free. What we can’t do is predict how busy the servers will be this evening or how well they’ll hold up over the next couple of days, but rest assured that yesterday everything was running as smooth as silk and our guys didn’t have a problem getting set up and jumping straight into battle. To qualify our relatively early review of the game, we’re putting this together to let you know exactly how the game works and what we think of the visuals, mechanics and controls.
#BATTLEFIELD 1943 RELEASE DATE CODE#
Getting our hands dirty with the final code yesterday capped everything off. From the constant flow of information from the official Twitter feed via nicely spaced demonstrations and press events right through to keeping the release date under wraps until everything was absolutely locked into place covering and following Battlefield 1943 has been a pleasure.
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Thankfully, EA, alongside developers DICE, have come along and shown everybody else how digital only game releases should be handled. PlayStation 3 gamers have been disgruntled with the console’s downloadable game release schedules and prices for some time, and justifiably so: promised dates for major titles like Fat Princess have slipped without explanation and the cost of some games (albeit ones mainly from third parties) have been disproportionate and poorly balanced.