After playing Battlefield 2 for quite some time and not being overly impressed with that game , I was really skeptical of any future battlefield type games done by EA. However do to some friends of mine who did purchase battlefield 2142 , and the fact they kept bugging me to get the game I decided I would give EA another chance. Now the big question is has EA turned over a new leaf and finally decided to produce a stunning game? or have they stuck to their old ways and just released yet another bug filled rushed out the door game?

Before I get into the game Review I would like to go over how you can purchase this game. The first option you have in getting this game is the EALINK software. You install the software and then via the software you can purchase the game and then have the game downloaded to your machine. I decided not to use the EALINK software after hearing about several issues people had in using the EALINK software. Also when you install the EALINK software and get the game the EALINK software screws the game up and you get invalid CD key errors. The only way to fix these CD key errors is to go into the registry and edit registry entry. This is something EA should have fixed right away and they shouldn’t expect users to have to go into the registry just to get the game to run properly.

The other option for getting the game is to buy it from a store and after hearing about the issues some people were having with EALINK thats the route I decided to take. One thing that shocked me about buying the game was its price. I forked out 59.99 Canadian before tax and after tax the total was $68.39.. So almost $70.00 for a game thats not even a built from the ground up totally new game. The game engine that battlefield 2142 uses is the same engine that battlefield 2 used with a couple tweaks.

If you decide to purchase this game from a store be aware that CD versions of the game may not be available. Every store I phoned only had the DVD version of the game. So you may want to do some checking before you rush to the store to pick up this game if your still using a CD rom drive.

First thing you notice when you open up the DVD case is a sheet of white paper and this tells you all about the in game advertising. Basically it tells you if you don’t want to see the in game ads then don’t install the game. For those that don’t know Battlefield 2142 contains billboards in the game and these billboards can be updated with new ads from time to time from EA. EA can also tell how long you are looking at the ads and stuff like that as well.

I wasn’t to impressed with this whole in game advertising thing at all. I think if EA is going to make money from advertising in game then they should lower the cost of the game for consumers. EA doesn’t need to make more money , they make loads of money every year. With the Battlefield games alone they make money off the game it self and then also off the servers that you need to have if you want to be ranked.

Money aside the other annoying thing about the in game advertising is that it is no doubt using up CPU cycles that could be spent on the game instead of tracking who is looking at what ad for how long.

Speaking of CPU cycles , on the box system requirements say the game can run on a 1.7 ghz pentium 4 and I have a friend that has a 2.4 ghz pentium 4 with 1 gig of ram and a ATI 9800 pro video card and for him the game most of the time is a slide show. He has all the game settings as low as they will go and for the most part the game performs like crap for him. I would like to see how the guy is doing that is running this game with the minimum system requirements lol..

Before I get into the game Review it self it should be noted I didn’t buy this game when it first come out and I just bought it on December 1 2006. The reason I mention that is because I was reading when the game first came out that it had lots of problems and was in need of patches. Do to the fact the game has been out for over a month and I just got it I will only be talking about stuff in the game that relates to the current updated battlefield 2142 and in this case thats version is 1.06.

While I’m on the topic of patches I would like to know why the EA servers that offer the patch are so damn slow. You would think a company with the money they have would at least be able to afford some good servers so their paying customers can get the patches for the game without waiting all day to download a 22 meg patch. Thank god file front had the patch I needed and they manage to give me the file in a matter of minutes.

Now onto the game the first thing I noticed with this game is the fact you have to have to create a user before you can get into the game. You can have multiple users on the game and each one has its medals and all that tracked separately. This comes in handy if you want to experiment with different unlock options.

For those that don’t know unlike a lot of first person shooters battlefield 2142 makes you unlock your weapons. They are trying to add a role playing like experience to the game. As you play in the game you will get experience points and when you get enough of them you can unlock certain items. These items then make your character more power full then he was to begin with.

I’m not so sure if I like this whole unlock your weapon idea. The one thing I loved about the first battlefield 1942 game was that you could load it up and you had access to every weapon that everyone else had. So you could play for a few hours and not have to worry about progressing your character at all. In battlefield 2142 in order for you to get all the weapon unlocks and the other item unlocks in the game you will have to be playing the game for a very long time. The more you play the game the longer it takes to get the next unlock as well. This puts the new players at a serious disadvantage compared to the veterans that play the game all the time in terms of what weapons and items they can access.

Once you make a character and give it a name you can enter the game. Any of you who have played battlefield 2 will be familiar with the browser type screen where you can see what servers are out there. This is one area that pisses me off. In my battlefield 2 Review the one thing I hated about that game browser was how none of the filters seemed to work. Well as one would expect from EA they made sure the filters don’t work in this game as well. Despite the fact I tell the game browser to only show non full servers and non empty servers the game browser still shows both full servers and empty servers. This pisses me off to no end , I can’t get over how they could think about making a game and not fix little bugs like that that were even in battlefield 2 …

And just like in Battlefield 2 in battlefield 2142 when you input a IP to do a direct IP connection the stupid game doesn’t even remember the IP you typed in.

Other things about the game browser are annoying as well. For example they have a server history screen you can look at and every server you have been on ends up in this list. The problem is there is no way in game to erase this list when it gets huge. From what I have read you have to go out side of the game and edit a text file somewhere to clear the entries. This is yet another example of EA sucking on the crack pipe again and clearly not putting any thought into the game browser at all.

Yet another issue with the game is the control configurations. I like to set my 5 mouse buttons the way I like them and I had problems doing that. In most games you bring the config screen up and assign your mouse button to whatever control you want. In Battlefield 2142 that works fine the first time but if you want to change some stuff around you have to blank out a previous mouse button in order to assign that mouse button elsewhere.

Two things added to the game browser are the news ticker and the buddy list. The news ticker part can give you the latest updates from EA as to whats happening with the game. The buddy list is something I like , it has a fly out panel that you can pull out and when its pulled out you can see the server your buddy’s are on and any info you might want to see. The best part of the buddy list is that you can click on a friend of yours in the buddy list and select Join the server and so you can in one click join the same server that your friends are playing on. This is a really cool feature and it makes finding your friends a hell of a lot faster.

Once I got into the game I was a bit surprised. I mean you can tell EA is using the old battlefield 2 engine for this game because some of the graphics look dated. On the same hand some of the stuff in game was done rather well and looks fairly good for a old graphics engine.

One thing I had to test out was the dune buggy looking thing I got in that and it moves along at a good clip. Hold the shift key down while in this buggy and you get a speed boost that really gets you moving along. Going up slopes in these buggies is also not a problem and thats a good thing. I’m happy to see they at least changed that from battlefield 2.

Overall I’m impressed with all the weapons and the vehicles in the game. All these things look rather good and all of them function fairly well. The only thing that is a bit iffy to me is the walkers. These things seem a bit clumsy to use. They are by far the most power full vehicle in the game in terms of what they can do damage wise. I would still rather be in a tank or the buggy and get around using them to me it just seems like a faster and a much smoother way to travel. There seems to be some issues with the walkers as well. Several times in the game I would be moving along in one and then loose the walking animation as in I’m not doing the walking motion but instead I’m just sort of moving like a tank would. Despite the fact the walker has some issues with it they certainly do look good in the game.

The other thing that is impressive in this game is the Titan mode. This mode of game play is what I like the most. The idea behind titan mode is each side has this huge air ship like thing and the first side to kill the other sides Titan wins the round. When you look up at these Titans in the air they look really cool. When you get on board the Titan you can do several things. You can Fly one of two flying craft or you can man the gun turrets on the titan and shoot ground targets. The Titans are fairly big ships and you got a fair amount of room to run around inside of them.

Along with the Titan mode you also have the Conquest mode like you do in battlefield 2. With this mode its all about who has the most flags capped and if you keep enough of the flags you win the round. Some of the maps in this mode have to much of a FOG look to them and I can’t stand this at all. With the Titan maps you don’t really notice any FOG at all unless your in one of the air craft.

One thing I would like to see changed is you shouldn’t have to re-equip your items or configure your weapon all the time. I would like to see these things stay what you set them to unless you change them. Countless times I load the game up and forget to configure my guy and that gets annoying.

The other annoying thing that was brought over from battlefield 2 was sometimes when your supposed to respawn back at your selected base you don’t. A few times I have been killed and watched the countdown down timer go to 00 and I would just sit there and it wouldn’t respawn me unless I went and re-clicked the same place I was already selected to spawn at..

Something else I noticed is in some of the vehicles when you use the guns in them they produce a muzzle flash and this can be way bigger then it should be. The problem you get is the muzzle flash is so big that some times you cant even see the target your shooting at and that can get on your nerves.

I figured I would save the biggest pain in the ass for last and that is…. This game crashes a lot a few times I have had it drop me back to desktop. It only crashes once in a while on me but I have friends that I play with and they get crashes each time they load the game up. Also along the lines of crashing the game , the game does not respond well to ALT TAB. I can tab out of the game fine but trying to get back in the game just hangs and I have to restart the computer.

Overall performance for me in game is very smooth but I’m on a fairly new machine. I usually get well above 50 frames a second regardless of the map or even the amount of players on a server. I will put my system specs below. There isn’t much to say about the sound in the game other then it sounds good to me and there are no issues there.

In conclusion are you ready for this?? I think the game is worth the money. Don’t get me wrong it does have quite a few issues as I have stated in this Review but when you get into the game with some friends you forget about most of the issues and the game is a blast to play. It’s not as fun as say Desert Combat was when I first started playing that but its not that bad either , its certainly better then battlefield 2..

System Specs.
ASUS A8N SLI DELUXE
AMD 64 X2 4800
2 GIGS OF PC3200 RAM
ATI 1900GT 256 MEG VIDEO CARD PCI-E
120 GIG MAXTOR 7200 RPM 8 MEG CACHE HARD DRIVE
PIONEER 110D DVD DRIVE
SOUND BLASTER AUDIGY PLATINUM

Game settings..
The game resolution was set to 1024 by 768
All graphic settings were maxed out and AA/AF were off.
Sound was set to hardware.

Below are a few more in game screen shots.

In this picture here you can clearly see 4 billboards that have the EA advertising on them..

This here has to be glitch in the game someone managed to knock the walker over and the walker couldn’t stand up regardless of what you tried.