Air vehicles come in two types: gunships and transports. The gunships carry two people, a pilot and a gunner, and are bristling with guns and rockets. The transports can carry up to five people including the pilot and are only lightly armed with two side mounted, passenger operated machine guns. Again, nothing very unusual or innovative here; as a matter of fact, I have yet to see anything that can compare with the sheer number and versatility of vehicles as seen in Planetside.
Strewn across the map are also two different types of player controllable turrets: anti-air and anti-vehicle. Neither seem to be very effective in their respective roles.
Finally a word on persistance, BF2142 uses a system of persistant scores. You create an account on a central server, which keeps tabs of all your scores so even if you play on one server one day and a different server the next, your scores carry over. You can use these scores to unlock different weapons, gear and skills as you progress, and you get different medals and awards for special achievements such as number of kills in a certain timespan, capturing objectives etc. Obviously this scoring system wasn't enabled in the demo, but it was present and as far as I can tell it was complete, so I think I got a good idea of the options available.
This latest installment seems to be very much geared towards the BF veteran in almost every way: its system of persistant scores and unlockables, its command structure, its repetitive gameplay (only 2 game modes) and limited amount of maps (10 official maps), even the fact that EA offers (or did offer) the opportunity to have your BF2 nick imported into BF2142 if you buy it directly through them, all are very focused on the die hard BF veteran/clan. It doesn't offer much for the casual player IMHO and these factors are even prohibitive for the BF novice to get into the game. I was tempted for a moment to get this but I decided it's not worth the ~50€, I'd rather wait for Crysis, HLČ:Episode Two and possibly Quakewars:ET for much FPS-y boomieliciousness.
