Battlefield 1942 is a vehicle based first person shooter (i.e. you can run around and shoot people, and sometimes jump in cars or planes and shoot people), developed by Digital Illusions CE (DICE for friends) and published by Electronic Arts in 2002. It has the odd distinction of being the first game with a Mac version that I'm reviewing.
As the name implies, the game is set during the second world war, and consequently features Allies against Axis. The focus is squarely multiplayer, single player is provided only through bots. You can choose between various classes with different weapons and use various cars, tanks and planes to fly around.
The game is also notable for being the basis for a wide variety of user-made modifications, including Desert Combat (based on Operation Desert Shield), Galactic Conquest (based on Star Wars) and Interstate 1982 (car combat and racing). None of them are the focus of this review, however.
There are not that many trains, and none you can drive. In fact, all there is is one kind of box car and some rails, acting as both scenery and obstacle/cover.
This car looks german enough, although I couldn't rule out it being used in Russia as well. In short, it's perfect for it's purpose.
Looking closely, you'll see that it has no coupling. This is odd, but then, there are no locomotives in the game anyway, so the cars won't actually move.
The rails themselves don't look too well. Sleeper spacing is far too large. Sleepers are what keeps the rails together, and the heavier the cars and locomotives, the closer they have to be together. The ones shown here will not be able to hold anything heavier than the empty cars you see on them. Phew, that was close.
Also questionable are the turning radii. This is way too tight here, railroads will have to slow to an absolute crawl to make these turns.
Cars, APCs, tanks, planes and ships are all essential elements of gameplay. Most of them are available in a version for axis and one for allies, with differences given only by different skins. Performance characteristics are generally identical for two vehicles of the same class. This is all not historically accurate, but it can be forgiven, due to balance issues.
It's a classic. You can see that by the fact that it has two expansion packs and three sequels, one of which having three expansions, already.
There is none. Sure, there's World War 2, but that's a setting, not a story. You can put the maps in a historical order (the single player campaigns do so), but you don't loose anything if you don't.
Fun fact: I bought my recent computer mainly to play this game. It didn't work well on my ancient GeForce 2 MX, but with my new FX 5600, it managed to fly...
The game's graphics aren't up to today's standards, but it still manages to look well enough. My iBook is just a little overworked by the Mac version, but on my iMac, it works well enough. It might on my PC (the one I bought for this game only), but I haven't tried it there in years.
To the untrained observer, i.e. me, it looks like a fairly normal shooter. You choose a class, then try to kill as many as possible. Some classes can heal other players, or place land mines and dynamite.
Where the game really shines is with the vehicles. You can (if one is free) jump in a jeep to get somewhere fast, or in a tank to kill others. There's the planes (I like them best), and if you're in for the real heavy stuff, you can use ships up to aircraft carrier. To this day, it remains one of my favorite games for this reason.
The trains are classical "meh" material. There's not enough of them to be really bad, but people did not really think much about the trains when building them. For this reason, the game gets the very unspecial "mediocre" rating.
Battlefield 1942 is © Electronic Arts.