January 2003

Battlefield 1942: The Road To Rome Preview ....
Posted by [luckee] @ 10:44 AM MST Monday, January 20, 2003 [Comment on news]

Homelan has posted up a good preview of the expansion the Road to Rome. Here’s a snip:

World War II continues to be a busy time period for game developers to milk for virtually any game genre and yet even with this sea of WWII titles, Battlefield: 1942 was something special. The multiplayer oriented first person shooter from developer Digital Illusions and publisher Electronic Arts got lots of pre-release hype in 2002 and it came through with that promise when it was released last fall. The game's support for up to 64 players gave the virtual soldiers access to vast battlegrounds in Europe, North Africa and in the Pacific with a boatload of weapons, gun emplacements and vehicles to use. Battlefield: 1942 became a best seller, won a bunch of gaming critics awards and thousands of players are playing the game online as we write this.

Both DICE and EA must have known that the game would be a huge hit because an expansion pack to Battlefield: 1942 was already in development before the game was released. Now that expansion, The Road to Rome, is nearly completion and HomeLAN got a chance to check out a near-final version of the game sent by ER to check out the product for ourselves.

The expansion pack uses the one major theater of war in WWII that wasn't touched on in the original game: the invasion of Italy and Sicily. The Road to Rome doesn't stray from its parent's gameplay formula of controlling and holding points on the map (If it aint broke..well, you can say the rest) but simply offers more of what Battlefield: 1942 did so well; new maps, new vehicles, new weapons and two new armies (the Allied French and the Axis Italians). My only regret in the expansion's new content is that The Road to Rome's settings don't allow for much naval combat (which may be why DICE and EA released a new official Pacific Theater map for free over the Internet last month that was heavy naval combat).

The expansion adds its new content directly into the original game so when you fire that game up for the first time following the installation you will see the six new maps clearly labeled in the game's menu interface. The expansion also installs a new 1.25 patch for the full game which presumably will be released separately as with the original, all six maps are based loosely on real battles that occurred in World War II. My two favorite maps in The Road to Rome are Operation Husky where you can parachute into the battle on the British side as your try to invade Sicily and take it from the Italian army. This map is the closest to an Omaha Beach scenario in the expansion and also features the only really large naval unit in the product (an Allied ship that provides cover for the British troops storming the beach)

However, my favorite map to play by far is the Battle for Monte Cassino, where the French army has to take a Benedictine monastery from a very well entrenched German force. Not only do the Allies have to start at the bottom of a hill and move up to take over each control point until they finally get to the monastery, the map itself is set at night with only a little bit of moonlight. It not only gives the map itself a look that's unlike other map in the expansion, but it also means that while the Allies are working themselves up that hill to the monastery you could up right up to an enemy tank and not notice it until its almost on top of you.