So I played around a bit with the BF2142 demo lately, and I have to say that it's fun for a while, but it gets boring playing the same map over and over. Or rather, the gameplay gets very boring and repetitive, and while the full version will have 10 maps to play with, I don't see it adding much but different scenery and some weapons and tech.

Quick description of the gameplay for those who don't know.

_{Note: I've never played any of the previous Battlefields, I have almost no idea what's new and what's not, so I'm just going to describe everything that struck me somehow. Some, or all, of these elements might already be present in previous installments and veterans might think "Well duh", so if you're a veteran, bear with me please.}

There are two gamemodes: "king of the hill for all" or KOTHFA (I forgot what the "official" name is) and Titan assault.

KOTHFA works like this: there are two teams, each of which starts out with a fixed number of tickets (which apparently is a remnant from previous BF episodes) and the objective of each team is to reduce the other team's tickets to 0. They can accomplish this in two different ways: by killing the opponents, where each kill = -1 ticket, the free-for-all part of the game. The other way to reduce the opponent's tickets is by capturing and holding certain points on the map; these capture points are represented in-game with flags, but I wouldn't call it a capture the flag scenario, since you don't have to bring the flag anywhere, you just have to prevent the enemy from re-capturing this particular area, hence the king of the hill aspect of the game. Holding one of these points results in a steady loss of tickets for the enemy, I think it's 1 ticket/minute.

Titan assault is the second game mode and is IMHO the more fun of the two, although it too gets quite repetitive after a while. In it, the objective is to destroy the other team's Titan, the Titan being a huge flying battle ship which serves as the initial spawn point for the team. The first thing to do in order to destroy the Titan is to bring down its shields. This can only be done by capturing and holding several AA missile sites which are spread around the map. Once your team has captured the missile site(s), it will automatically fire a missile every two minutes, without any player help/intervention. Obviously the more sites your team controls, the faster the Titan shields will come down.

Once the shields are down, the Titan's hull will start to take damage from the missile impacts, but it takes ages for these missiles to actually destroy it. The quickest way to destroy the enemy Titan is for you and your team to board it, destroy four reactor control consoles, which opens up the reactor room and in turn to destroy the reactor, causing the entire Titan to meltdown/explode.

That's it gamemode-wise.

As for classes, there are four different classes: the default soldier class which also doubles as medic (rambo medics much encouraged), the engineer who doubles as panzer guy, the sniper and the heavy weapons guy who also doubles as field ops. They're all pretty standard fare. The soldier-medic dispenses healthpacks and revives team mates. The panzer-engineer repairs vehicles of his own team and kills the other team's vehicles with his panzer, there's no point in trying to panzer infantry though as the panzer does virtually no splash damage, so unless you can actually hit them 1-shot-1-kill style it's just a waste of ammo. The sniper is the only single-role class, not much else to it. The heavy weapons field ops dispenses ammo and carries around a MMG which unlike W:ET can be used to some extent while on the move, but it's much preferable to go prone somewhere and let her rip; there's no deploying the MMG as such, going prone is all it takes.

Something which is much more prominent in BF2142 than in W:ET is its system of a command hierarchy. The entire team is lead by a commander, and it's subdivided in a number of squads, each headed by a squad leader. As squad leader, you can issue orders by putting different types of waypoints on the map: defend this, attack that, rally here; that sort of thing. As commander you can do the same, but with squads as in "squad A attack that, squad B defend this" etc. Not a bad system, but it depends a lot on people's willingness to A) join squads and B) follow orders once they're in the squad. As for A), I've personally see it happen where there were 20+ people on the entire team, divided into 3-4 squads, but those squads only contained about 7-8 people in total; so there were 12+ loose cannons running around.

Now, I suppose there are server settings which can force people to join squads, but that still leaves the problem of B), which can be just as frustrating, if not more. Again from personal experience I've seen it happen more than once that one team was absolutely hammering the Titan reactor while most of the opposing team was off doing all sorts of unproductive things like trying to recapture lost missile sites, with only a handful of people trying in vain to set up a defense. Sidenote: the way these reactor rooms are set up, it's very feasible for a medium sized, well balanced squad of 4-5 people to defend it against superior numbers of attackers. At a guess, all things being equal, I'd say the attacking force would need about a 2:1 advantage to succesfully storm a well defended reactor room, so there's certainly no need for everybody on the team to drop everything and defend the reactor, but there's certainly a need for good coordination of who should defend and who should continue to try and achieve objectives of their own.

To be fair, this tendency for the chaotic can probably be attributed in part to the fact that it was mostly a bunch of noobs playing. Still, I don't see how one would "enforce" commands or strategies even with experienced players, unless there's the peer-pressure of being a member of a clan (which is probably the whole idea), something I personally have no interest in.

I should probably mention the vehicles, since every FPS of the last couple of years has included player controllable vehicles, but like its classes BF2142's vehicles are pretty standard fare. There's the light and fast jeep, carries 3, lightly armed and armored. There's the APC, which is slower and moderately armed and armored, carries 6 or 7 (I forgot how many exactly). Then there's the tank, carries 2, heavier armor and armament, and finally the battlemechs which also carry 2, and are the heaviest sluggers on the battlefield both in armor and armament. Tanks and mechs are roughly equal in firepower and armor, so if one's already a bit damaged the other can probably slug it out and survive (albeit heavily damaged itself). Rule of thumb seems to be that the one who gets the first shot in will win the battle. That's it for the ground vehicles.