Today I splurged 3 hours on Battlefield 2142 beta, and I gotta say, its the best open battlefield shooter ive ever played.

For anyone who has played BF2, you know exactly what to expect, but some changes have come about this time. Instead of capturing enemy flags, you need to stand near long range missile launchers to capture them, and once you have them, as long as you hold that launcher for your team, it will shoot highly explosive missiles at the enemys command ship. To take down a command ship you take out the shields first (using the missile launchers, so first you need to take all the bases possible, very BF2-esque) and then you need to fly into the lower levels of the enemy command ship and fight your way down into the hull where you take out the 4 main engines, effectively cutting power to the ship and preventing it from restoring energy to the sheilds. That part of the battle is the most strategic and engaging segement of the game, and its what sets it apart from its predecessors. One you take out the engines, you bail and you retake the misslie launchers (or just keep them the whole time, saves alot of bloodshed) and use them to destroy the hull of the enemy command ship and BOOOOOOOOOOOM! it goes down in an explosion.

Anyone who has played the other battlefield games knows exactly whats in store when it comes to classes and so on, but things have changed a bit in that department. You can now cutomize your solider's weapon and defensive kit for combat, and the 6 classes from BF2 have been cut down to 4: Assault, Commander (I think its commander...starts with a C anyways), Support and Engineer. Thats basically assault, sniper/scout, support and engineer from BF2, not too complicated. To go with the futuristic theme, there are futuristic weapons. One team gets laser weapons, the other gets bullet, but both are only cosmetic changes to the same weapon.

Vehicles are very much akin to BF2, but there have been some changes. There are now high speed air cruisers that carry large numbers of passengers and can deploy the passengers in escape pods that go crashing to the ground (think star wars or Halo 2) and release the solider. There are also hover jets (like helecopters), tanks, cars and a special kind of space bus that looks an awful lot like a hot dog, but it can fire EMP (electro magnetic pulse) that shut down enemy vehicles temporarily, giving you time to gun them down. The best new vehicle is the 2 man Mech, its a towering 2 story beast thats hard to control, but moves at a decent speed and comes equipped with rapidfire missiles and dual machine guns. A second player can command the turrets above to add 2 extra machine guns, making the mech a walking death machine.

So far, Ive played 4 games (in 3 hours...long games, long indeed) and advanced to corporal (rank 2). Im having a great time, and you definetly should keep and eye on BF2142, its a new personal favorite and everyone else should love it too.