Battlefield 1943 (Xbox 360)
Battlefield 1943 tries to trim down the ground battles of the Pacific Theater into skirmishes between two teams of twelve players, and despite the reduction in scope, this World War II first-person shooter does an impressive job of capturing the chaos of war. You can find yourself charging up a hill as an infantryman as a burning plane spirals out of the sky, a rocket whizzing past you to put a dent in the nearby tank’s armor before a sniper hiding in the smoldering remains of a building picks you off with you unaware they were ever even there. In such moments you feel small, just the latest casualty in a large conflict, but cutting the island conflicts down to 24 person affairs also means you can have an incredible impact on the course of the fight as well.
Battlefield 1943 is a multiplayer-only game where it’s main mode draws on three battlefields that the United States and Japan fought on during World War II. Iwo Jima, Wake Island, and Guadalcanal all feel distinct from each other, not only because of some important environmental touches like Iwo Jima having darker skies than the bright and sunny Wake Island, but the shapes of these islands heavily influence the flow of battle. In a normal Battlefield 1943 battle, there are five positions the two teams fight to capture, their locations spread around the island in a fairly smart way. Both teams often have a base or at least an offshore carrier they’ll always control, but taking control points on the island will give players new areas to spawn in after a death. The points are far enough apart that it’s difficult for a team to consistently manage defense, meaning the control points are constantly changing hands over the course of a battle. Taking a point is made simple too, just a single soldier able to stand near to the flag and it will fairly quickly shift sides. There’s enough time for someone to come in to attempt some defense and a flag can’t be taken if players from both teams are near it. This system guarantees that the flow of battle can shift quickly and often, even a lone soldier able to sneak in and help turn the tides. The island shapes help diversify how this can happen, the horseshoe shape of Wake Island for example meaning its harder to take far off bases but over in Guadalcanal the large central mountainous area exposes control points that sit in that area while masking others.
The importance of control points comes in how armies are managed in Battlefield 1943. Both sides are given a certain amount of “revival tickets” that depletes each time someone falls as a soldier and comes rushing back in as another. Kills are of course very important because of it, but beyond the benefits of holding a base like being able to respawn near useful vehicles, holding enough bases will cause the opposition’s tickets to gradually deplete even if no one is dying. Running out of tickets causes an immediate loss for the team, and with respawns being fairly quick, battles won’t often drag on too long. If the tickets aren’t running out though, there is a match timer as well and whichever team has the most remaining respawns available will be declared the winner.
Notably, while the Japanese and American forces look different in design and their bases will feature some layout differences, both sides are essentially on an equal level as your capabilities won’t change based on whichever army you’re randomly assigned to. This applies to the vehicles that appeared in controlled areas as well, so while the U.S. can roll out in M4 Sherman tanks, they’re not all that different from the Japanese Chi-Ha tanks beyond looks. Similarly, the types of soldiers you can play as will utilize functionally similar equipment so a rifleman is always going to have the same options available to them. When you deploy your soldier for a new life, you get to pick not only which point they appear at but which class you want them to be, the options being a Rifleman, Scout, and Infantry. The Infantryman primarily utilizes a machine gun but also packs an anti-tank rifle and a wrench useful for repairing vehicles, making them a good pick for vehicle conflict but a bit unreliable in direct soldier-to-soldier combat. The Rifleman’s semi-automatic rifle is slow to fire compared to the Infantry’s main weapon but kills quickly when it can land its shots consistently and it packs a grenade launching function so you’re not useless against enemy armor. Both of these pack typical grenades as well, something the Scout lacks due to its focus on stealth and sniping. A sniper rifle that almost guarantees a kill and explosive charges you can detonate when you please define the Scout’s options, although they at least have a pistol for desperate times as the sniper rifle is slow to reload and hard to utilize in close range.
In an interesting choice, while every weapon has a set clip before it needs to reload, you have unlimited ammo, meaning you don’t need to be too careful when opening fire unless there’s a built-in issue like the sniper rifle’s slow reload time. Explosives passively regenerate so they’re not always available, those requiring a bit more thought on when you use them and thus limiting their often destructive potential. The areas you fight in are actually incredibly destructible, and while it’s often the heavy duty options that will wear things down, even a foot soldier can still shoot apart plants or break down fences in their path. The heavy explosives definitely lead to the more interesting reshaping of the battlefield though, with entire buildings sometimes reduced to rubble over the course of the conflict. Burning flames and walls that barely stand on their own replace the areas you might have squatted in for cover earlier, and since control points change hands so often, you don’t necessarily want to bust everything down since that will make defending it afterwards harder. Tanks and planes will definitely be the main culprits for reshaping the battlefield, their shells and bombs able to make quick work of their targets but appropriate limits keep them from dominating the conflict. In fact, vehicles are replaced pretty shortly after they’re destroyed, meaning the game had to have a strong balance in place to avoid vehicles being too effective.
The tank’s counters are baked into the weapon sets of the three character classes, each one having some way to deal some significant damage to a large target but not outright destroy it with ease. You still likely won’t want to challenge a tank head-on, especially if they have someone on the machine guns, but it’s not hopeless to find yourself against one. The planes have a more interesting restriction to them, that being that they aren’t the easiest to control. Wide turns and difficulties in suddenly gaining altitude mean you can’t just rain gunfire down on everybody with ease, and while your bullets can tear through a ground troop like paper, lining up that shot isn’t going to be a breeze. Dropping bombs is a bit easier to set up but appropriately the controls means you can do only a quick bombing run before needing to work yourself back around, and who knows if people who have mounted provided anti-air turrets will have shot you down before you get the chance to complete the turn. There are two other vehicle types, some landing craft giving aquatic options although the boats are often best used for leaving an aircraft carrier base or more quickly traversing the odd shape of Wake Island rather than fighting from them. The jeep is an interesting addition though, carrying multiple players quickly across the map and containing a mounted machine gun to dish out damage, and even if you’re on your own you can switch from being the driver to the gunman and back again with quick button presses so it works as a portable turret.
What all of this adds up to is a fairly effective multiplayer format, the choices players make on which class to use and if they’ll man a vehicle not only influencing the outcome next time they find an enemy to fight, but possibly changing the map itself as destruction alters the shape of the flashpoints that are the flag bases. A few other little things like being able to call in a slow but strong air raid or hunker in indestructible pillboxes also add a few more variables to the mix, and while you will likely quickly come to know and recognize a lot of what can happen in a match of Battlefield 1943 multiplayer, you also can’t outright predict how the fight will go. A player might splinter off and claim an unexpected base across the island, giving your team a new staging point. A sniper might find a normally untouched part of the map and keep picking off players who didn’t think to check something like the mostly useless shipwreck on Guadalcanal. You’re given most of what you will use during a life when you appear at a base, be it weapon or vehicle, so there won’t be any tense battles to get game-changing equipment or anything like that, but you can dynamically shift your approach based on what the enemy is doing. That hill in Iwo Jima might be hard to climb, but fly a plane over and parachute to the flag and maybe you can snag it before they gun you down. There is a very tight and clean relationship between the options available in Battlefield 1943, but it does feel like a wider range of maps would have done a lot to keep calling you back for more matches. The three islands are smartly designed but you do find yourself drawn to the same few areas to fight, the well spaced control point system admittedly leaving certain areas of the map practically untouched.
There is one extra mode in Battlefield 1943, Air Superiority presenting a new map in the Coral Sea but also making the conflict almost exclusively about aerial dogfights. You start on aircraft carriers here and can man its guns if your spawn point needs defending, but the fights will more likely take place in the center of this large open map that can only be reached by flying over water in one of the abundant warplanes. Normally, a plane on plane fight can be a bit one-sided or very slow since there aren’t many evasive maneuvers or ways to shift who has the advantage, but multiple planes in the air can lead to a bit more action and chaos and there is a single middle control point to fight over to motivate all the planes converging. It still feels like a somewhat weak mode since plane controls were definitely built around restricting them properly for their limited role in the main modes rather than supporting intense and exciting dogfights, so perhaps just a fourth main map would have been preferable to this mode that was released later into the game’s lifespan.
THE VERDICT: Battlefield 1943 makes a fairly exciting war game out of very little, but a good deal was put into the component parts. The islands all have their control points intelligently designed and placed, the class weapons and vehicles counter each other well and have smart limits in place, and having 12 players to a team makes the fight seem large as there is enough crossfire present to ensure it’s rarely a duel between two gunmen. The destructible environments spice things up even further as there are clear shifts in options over the course of a battle, but it would have been nice to have more islands or modes to stave off some of the familiarity with where you’ll be heading in every fight.
And so, I give Battlefield 1943 for Xbox 360…
A GOOD rating. Battlefield 1943 was created as a budget Battlefield experience, coming in at 1/4th the price of a standard Battlefield release and thus offering less than a fully fledged game in the series. It doesn’t want to be too expansive and so the obvious desire for more maps to fight on stands a bit in opposition to the intent of the experience. If you want more maps, you’re meant to play other Battlefield games, but there was still room for some greater variety without throwing off the well-balanced variables at play. A mode with moving control points that took you to less explored parts of the map could add some novelty, although their positions of course would not match the well-honed standard ones which manage crossfire potential and defensive options smartly so that defenders and offense are never outside of the other team’s reach. More reasons to go out and attempt non-standard strategies or move away from the constant assault on control points would add some more situational variety, but the diversity in approach options still means that Battlefield 1943 doesn’t grow repetitive quickly. Battlefield 1943 wants most of your battle options quickly at your fingertips, and while it smartly limits teams to only a certain amount of active tanks or planes, some other options beyond the slow and situational bombing run could have spiced things up. Special events like a weather shift could change the game feel without being too disruptive, but Battlefield 1943 does work well as a multiplayer experience where you can pop in for a quick and condensed war shooter that doesn’t demand knowing a litany of systems to do well at. You’ve got a few guns and vehicles to worry about and even a new player can pick up on the relationships between them all in a few matches, the action still guided in new directions by specific player choices. Fleshing it out more would have made it more robust and replayable, but it’s nice to have a quick source of military action if that’s the itch you need scratched.
Battlefield 1943 definitely shows the developer DICE has a strong sense for the essentials of an effective war shooter. Paring away the wrong features could have lead to a game that dries up too quickly or is dominated by a certain attack option, but here you can find purpose in each option or just stick to what you like and still reliably contribute. This review is unfortunately published after a server closure in December of 2023 was announced, eventually rendering the game almost entirely unplayable, but it certainly brought plenty of joy for those who picked it up even if its likely to leave you a bit hungry to see how the bigger Battlefield games iterated on this approach of providing a remarkably well-condensed slice of warfare.