I picked up Battlefield 2142 yesterday and played it a bit. I had experimented with the demo, and I felt the demo was good enough to warrant a spin with the discounted full version. Overall it feels like a slick mod for BF2, and there are some good parts and bad parts.
Gameplay:
Gameplays is not too different overall than BF2. As I have all the craptastic default weapons (you don’t even start with grenades, WTF), I have had to modify my gameplay. I typically prefer a mid-range game, but the default weapons overheat quickly and are not very accurate over long distances. I’ve been mostly using the Cucumbernator run and gun method, where I simply try to flank around and strafe at close distances while spraying. It works very well, and in fact I was able to contribute right away even without gadgets or good weapons. There are also more incentives to be in a squad now, with all the squad gadgets and bonuses.
Where I die most of the time is in vehicle battles. I still don’t know what most of the weapons do, and which weapons can hurt which vehicles. On the plus side, it is much easier for infantry to take out vehicles because of all the great hiding spots, and the huge amount of vehicles also make it harder to farm everyone up in a single tank. Plus a lot of the vehicles are designed more for teamwork. For example, the tank main seat no longer has a machine gun, and the gunner seat is now enclosed.
I like that they rolled up most of the classes, and it doesn’t feel like there are any useless classes now (maybe support, but the sentry guns seem pretty good for defending corridors). It’s much much harder to medic-whore now, as packs are AOE HOT instead of single-target insta-heal. The defib also looks really weird now. In spite of that, being able to customize your soldier is pretty neat, and the field updates give you a chance to try out toys you might not have unlocked yet.
Polish:
Of course it always seems like the support from EA/Dice is so crappy. A month old patch downloads from their official site at about 30 kb/s. The patch system is also confusing with no notes, and lately they have had beta patches. I downloaded the most recent one and found there was only one ranked server with that patch version. Even worse, it only plays one map over and over again (Highway Tampa 2142).
The other thing I found odd was the original version only supported up to 1024 resolution or something. Even after patching up, I can only select up to 1280×960; asking for support of 1280×1024 is not that unusual! I didn’t notice any bugs with the game itself yet, although I couldn’t use my name GrapesOfWrath because it was taken. However, I swapped in Grapes0fWrath with a zero instead of the letter, and that worked fine.
There were definitely a lot of interface improvements. The squad-linked info is really nice, so that when I put my reticle on some random enemy, my squadmates will see an indicator on their HUD without me having to actively “spot” my target. The system is pretty much everything Ghost Recon Advanced Warfare tried to be, and feels futuristic, but realistic. Also the inclusion of a buddy list should finally put an end to the annoyance of figuring out what server everyone is joining.
Elsewhere Online | Kabitzin 10/08/2007 | 
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