Reviewed by: Ebow
Developer: Various
Publisher: Various

One of the most rewarding elements of online gaming for me is the community that surrounds a lot of the games that are released. My first experience of this was with Quake 2. The most rewarding aspect? That fans of the game would get in there, tweak it, and make what often amounted to new games.

These mods came thick and fast for Quake 2, including the mighty Loki's Minions CTF mod - great maps, great radio comms, great grapple. Ahh, those were the days...

Battlefield 1942 has been getting the same community-built mod treatment for a while now, and with the release of Operation Anubis and Forgotten Hope in the last few weeks, I thought it about time to look at what's out there, and why in my humble opinion these mods make the game the outstanding gaming experience it is.

Background: Battlefield 1942 released last year. A multiplayer battle-fest set during WW2, the single player game amounted to the MP maps with bots. The big draw of the game was the seamless switching between air and ground vehicles and "vanilla" FPS action. You could be flying a plane one second, driving a tank the next, running to a cap point the next. The inclusion of vehicles, along with the console-y control systems, made the game instantly playable. A quick and easy to use radio command menu completed the mix.

While I'm aware of other mods that have been released for the game, this review will look at 3: Desert Combat, Eve of Destruction and Forgotten Hope.

Desert Combat

Desert Combat uses the game engine and massive outdoor maps to bring the gameplay bang up to date. Gone are the prop planes of BF1942, in come jets, A10 tankbusters and the beautifully crafted helicopters. The ground vehicles include Humvees, Shilka AA vehicles, APCs and a variety of modern tanks.

What this particular mod brought to the game was speed of gameplay. With the jets hurtling along, and the Blackhawk and Hind helicopters able to carry a number of passengers, getting soldiers into the heat of the battle was now a much quicker thing. No longer would there be a pause as everyone got in a tank and trundled into the fray; no longer would there be a scramble for the prop planes.

BF1942 was often an instant fix of combat; DC guarantees it. With the inclusion of a mobile spawn point for the Coalition team (an AC-130 gunship, with side firing cannons and machine guns included), the tactical element of the game takes on a whole new edge. With Stinger missiles added to the soldiers arsenal, there are less instances of air domination.

I cannot rate this mod highly enough. There is nothing more beautiful than the sight of two Apache gunships strafing enemy positions; than mid air collisions of high speed aircraft; than the moment everyone bails out of a Blackhawk, falling to the ground attached to parachutes, machine guns blazing.

If the WW2 setting of the original puts you off, get DC. With the massive maps that came with BF1942, the game takes on a whole new slant that cannot be underestimated.

Eve of Destruction

This Vietnam/Indochina mod, for me, is somewhere between vanilla BF1942 and DC. It has helicopters (Cobras, Hueys etc) and aircraft from the period, and a variety of new maps custom built to reflect the conflicts the game is built around.

The big draw for me is the helicopters, again. 5 Hueys taking off from a beach absolutely requires Wagner on the MP3 player, and cheesy Apocalypse Now quotes. The helicopters fly slightly differently in this mod from DC - more player friendly and much less likely to be doing barrel rolls while you get used to the mouse/keyboard skills required for effective helo control in DC.

Given that the Battlefield: Vietnam game is coming out soon, the EoD creators must be very frustrated. They have done a great job with the mod, though, and if you are a fan of Vietnam movies, this mod may be your thing.

Forgotten Hope

Labelled by a lot of the players on servers I've played on as "what BF1942 should have been", this takes the original game and makes it much much bigger. The maps are bigger (one especially, Orel, feels like two: a large city with a large railway station next to it, with airfields above and below), the tanks are bigger, and the vehicles have been added to (the new planes are great).

Fans of the vanilla game would be well advised to download this. It is perhaps the scale of it that makes it feel like a new game entirely, and well worth the download.


Operation Anubis was released this week, and after a quick go on a server obviously one of the player's PCs, it appears to be a mod version of the Secret Weapons add-on that was released recently. This may be doing it an injustice, as I've only had the briefest of experiences, but what I saw was enough for me to stick with the mod and not rush out and buy Secret Weapons.

And this is the point of supporting mods, in a nutshell: they're often a new game, they're free, they're written by gaming fans and they spawn new communities. New maps are added often, the mod bugs are fixed quickly, and new features are added with each new update: all for the price of a download.

Mods are what keep a game installed on my machine, and why I stuck with Quake 2 for so long (remember Lithium, anyone? There's still a server running this - played on it the other day lol). With the ease of playability of BF1942, it's mods are worthy of your time if you need something more than prop planes and tanks, or bigger prop planes and tanks ;)