Battlefield 1942 was arguably one of the best PC shooters, it's fast paced capture the flag style multiplayer gameplay instantly drew in fans and left them playing for quite some time after it's release. Such was the success and popularity of 1942 that Electronic Arts decided to revisit the World War II era with it's Battlefield series but not in a way many expected. Downloadable games have for the most part been low budget independent games, low graphics intensive games like UNO and redos of old SEGA and Nintendo arcade games. With this in mind, when EA announced that Battlefield 1943 would be a downloadable game and not a full retail release, I imagine their were a few curious eyebrows raised. The result though speak for itself, Battlefield 1943 is the future of downloadable games and it is awesome. Costing only 1200 Microsoft Points it comes with four absolutely beautiful maps, Wake Island, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal and Coral Sea. The four maps are huge with multiple capture points and large aircraft carriers for starting points. The game is also powered by the Frostbite engine we saw in Battlefield: Bad Company which means you can blow pretty much everything up from tanks and aircraft to buildings and bunkers. Occassionally something won't blow up, like you'll aim at some snadbags and the ones behind will blow up or it'll look like it's bounced off and blown up the ground but these are rare occurances. The explosions look just as amazing as they did in Bad Company and like Bad Company there are also plenty of red explodable barrels littered around the map to add to the mayhem. The game does look and sound a lot like Bad Company, which in this case is a good thing. Guns sound and look impressive, you know the sniper rifle packs a punch because of the loud ass noise it makes when you fire it and I'm actually almost inclined to say the Japanese Type 100 looks nicer in this than it does in Call of Duty: World at War. Get caught in an explosion and your hearing will falter for a second through shellshock, get caught in a firefight with gets flying overhead and tanks roll up and you'll think you're caught in an actual battle zone, it gets pretty intense. Buildings, vehicles and soldiers all look amazing and the contrast between the lighter looking Wake Island and the darker, more muted Iwo Jima is nice.

The gameplay is really good, taking place in the first person it helps you feel like you're right in the fight as you take control of either a rifleman, submachine gunner or sniper playing for the Americans or Japanese. It's important to note that there is only an online component to 1943 so if you don't like playing online then don't bother buying it. You can play your standard online game with jets and tanks with up to 24 people or you can play a special mode called air superiority where all you have are planes and you have to fly into a certain point of the map and control it. Obviously for air superiority you have to be quite the flyer and as always 1943's planes take quite sometime to get used to. There is a tutorial though which will let you practice as much as you want and I advise taking it, at least through that you'll be skilled enough to fly straight into an enemy and get a kill that way. If you can take the time to master flight it's worth it as dogfights and bombing runs are some of the coolest and funnest things to do in the game. For me the easiest way to get kills were with the sniper rifle, it packs a mighty whallop and unlike other new games there isn't the breathing feature when you're aiming so it's pretty steady. Unfortunately this is one of the drawbacks, the sniper rifle is almost too powerful. I've never been good at sniping yet if I can get off one half decent shot I can get a kill, sometimes from across the map. Some balancing between the weapons may need to be done as the sniper just owns all the others. Also the tanks can be pretty piss poor sometimes, one time I shot at a guy four times and he didn't die but one shot to the back of my tank and I was dead. They seem to have a fairly small blast radius so you really need to aim right for them to be effective. I know I said it before but the planes are so cool, even though I haven't quite mastered them yet, just hearing them fly overheard and then swoop down to release some bombs is so cool, it reminds me of Michael Bay's Pearl Harbour or John Woo's Windtalkers. The game isn't perfect and occassionally there'll be a bit of lag or a glitch in animation and from a distance troop movements can look a bit funny but for a downloadable game it's amazing and I can forgive that. It's easy to get onto a server so you'll be in the action fairly quickly and with new maps expected to roll out in the future to give it a longer lifespan this game is certainly worth the 1200 points. I can't wait to see what future downloadable games are like after companies take notice of what EA has managed to do here, it truly is remarkable feat and a big step forward for the medium. I give Battlefield 1943 9 bombing runs out of 10.