Battlefield 2142 - Game Review (PC)
By A J Summersgill

Published Wednesday, November 15, 2006  | 0 comments  | Print  | E-mail

Battlefield 2 players will feel instantly at home, the menus and settings screens are almost identical to the earlier titles, and the combat is very similar as well. Indeed, many have decried Battlefield 2142 as an expensive modification for Battlefield 2, and whilst it’s true to say that they play almost identically, it’s really a disservice to the game. Scratching below the surface of BF2142 reveals many subtle differences, not least of which are the new troop classes and the unlocking feature in the game.

Aha, the sky, yes, you’ll be seeing a lot of this

Compared with BF2’s seven classes of soldiers, BF2142 has only four, Recon, Assault, Engineer and Support. Each class of soldier draws on more than one "historical" class. For example, the Assault trooper is a mixture of the old Assault class and the Medic class - part of the regular grunt’s armory now includes a revival kit. It goes even deeper than this though, as players progress through their "career." It’s possible to unlock new kit whenever one is promoted in the field. This extra kit can be something that applies to all classes–carrying grenades, special injections to increase available sprint time, or something class-specific.

Finally, there are Squad Leader upgrades exclusively for use to assist in managing a squad in the field. All these upgrades are available instantly, the moment they are unlocked. Sometimes, squads are even awarded temporary field upgrades on the spot which will last as long as the server runs the map.

With the number and variety of upgrades available, BF2142 allows a great variety of different classes of soldiers to operate in the field, and in theory, depending on the load out of each soldier, no two players in a game need be exactly the same.

The Customization screen allows a player to pick and choose what they take into battle

The game is of course playable in single-player mode, although why anyone would want to do this is beyond me. It’s only by playing on ranked servers that one is able to unlock any of the items that some of the bots routinely carry. Logging into a server is completely painless and much faster than in BF2. There’s also a handy built-in buddy system so friends can easily hook up with each other online and wreak havoc together.

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