First thing you notice when you open up the DVD case is a sheet of white paper and this tells you all about the in game advertising. Basically it tells you if you don't want to see the in game ads then don't install the game. For those that don't know Battlefield 2142 contains billboards in the game and these billboards can be updated with new ads from time to time from EA. EA can also tell how long you are looking at the ads and stuff like that as well.

I wasn't to impressed with this whole in game advertising thing at all. I think if EA is going to make money from advertising in game then they should lower the cost of the game for consumers. EA doesn't need to make more money , they make loads of money every year. With the Battlefield games alone they make money off the game it self and then also off the servers that you need to have if you want to be ranked.

Money aside the other annoying thing about the in game advertising is that it is no doubt using up CPU cycles that could be spent on the game instead of tracking who is looking at what ad for how long.

Speaking of CPU cycles , on the box system requirements say the game can run on a 1.7 ghz pentium 4 and I have a friend that has a 2.4 ghz pentium 4 with 1 gig of ram and a ATI 9800 pro video card and for him the game most of the time is a slide show. He has all the game settings as low as they will go and for the most part the game performs like crap for him. I would like to see how the guy is doing that is running this game with the minimum system requirements lol..

Before I get into the game Review it self it should be noted I didn't buy this game when it first come out and I just bought it on December 1 2006. The reason I mention that is because I was reading when the game first came out that it had lots of problems and was in need of patches. Do to the fact the game has been out for over a month and I just got it I will only be talking about stuff in the game that relates to the current updated battlefield 2142 and in this case thats version is 1.06.

While I'm on the topic of patches I would like to know why the EA servers that offer the patch are so damn slow. You would think a company with the money they have would at least be able to afford some good servers so their paying customers can get the patches for the game without waiting all day to download a 22 meg patch. Thank god file front had the patch I needed and they manage to give me the file in a matter of minutes.

Now onto the game the first thing I noticed with this game is the fact you have to have to create a user before you can get into the game. You can have multiple users on the game and each one has its medals and all that tracked separately. This comes in handy if you want to experiment with different unlock options.

For those that don't know unlike a lot of first person shooters battlefield 2142 makes you unlock your weapons. They are trying to add a role playing like experience to the game. As you play in the game you will get experience points and when you get enough of them you can unlock certain items. These items then make your character more power full then he was to begin with.

I'm not so sure if I like this whole unlock your weapon idea. The one thing I loved about the first battlefield 1942 game was that you could load it up and you had access to every weapon that everyone else had. So you could play for a few hours and not have to worry about progressing your character at all. In battlefield 2142 in order for you to get all the weapon unlocks and the other item unlocks in the game you will have to be playing the game for a very long time. The more you play the game the longer it takes to get the next unlock as well. This puts the new players at a serious disadvantage compared to the veterans that play the game all the time in terms of what weapons and items they can access.

Once you make a character and give it a name you can enter the game. Any of you who have played battlefield 2 will be familiar with the browser type screen where you can see what servers are out there. This is one area that pisses me off. In my battlefield 2 Review the one thing I hated about that game browser was how none of the filters seemed to work. Well as one would expect from EA they made sure the filters don't work in this game as well. Despite the fact I tell the game browser to only show non full servers and non empty servers the game browser still shows both full servers and empty servers. This pisses me off to no end , I can't get over how they could think about making a game and not fix little bugs like that that were even in battlefield 2 ...

And just like in Battlefield 2 in battlefield 2142 when you input a IP to do a direct IP connection the stupid game doesn't even remember the IP you typed in.

Other things about the game browser are annoying as well. For example they have a server history screen you can look at and every server you have been on ends up in this list. The problem is there is no way in game to erase this list when it gets huge. From what I have read you have to go out side of the game and edit a text file somewhere to clear the entries. This is yet another example of EA sucking on the crack pipe again and clearly not putting any thought into the game browser at all.

Yet another issue with the game is the control configurations. I like to set my 5 mouse buttons the way I like them and I had problems doing that. In most games you bring the config screen up and assign your mouse button to whatever control you want. In Battlefield 2142 that works fine the first time but if you want to change some stuff around you have to blank out a previous mouse button in order to assign that mouse button elsewhere.

Two things added to the game browser are the news ticker and the buddy list. The news ticker part can give you the latest updates from EA as to whats happening with the game. The buddy list is something I like , it has a fly out panel that you can pull out and when its pulled out you can see the server your buddy's are on and any info you might want to see. The best part of the buddy list is that you can click on a friend of yours in the buddy list and select Join the server and so you can in one click join the same server that your friends are playing on. This is a really cool feature and it makes finding your friends a hell of a lot faster.

Once I got into the game I was a bit surprised. I mean you can tell EA is using the old battlefield 2 engine for this game because some of the graphics look dated. On the same hand some of the stuff in game was done rather well and looks fairly good for a old graphics engine.

One thing I had to test out was the dune buggy looking thing I got in that and it moves along at a good clip. Hold the shift key down while in this buggy and you get a speed boost that really gets you moving along. Going up slopes in these buggies is also not a problem and thats a good thing. I'm happy to see they at least changed that from battlefield 2.

Overall I'm impressed with all the weapons and the vehicles in the game. All these things look rather good and all of them function fairly well. The only thing that is a bit iffy to me is the walkers. These things seem a bit clumsy to use. They are by far the most power full vehicle in the game in terms of what they can do damage wise. I would still rather be in a tank or the buggy and get around using them to me it just seems like a faster and a much smoother way to travel. There seems to be some issues with the walkers as well. Several times in the game I would be moving along in one and then loose the walking animation as in I'm not doing the walking motion but instead I'm just sort of moving like a tank would. Despite the fact the walker has some issues with it they certainly do look good in the game.