It's a lovely war n'all,
we just need a picnic basket.

That in some ways is the best description of this expansion pack, for better or for worse this is the core gameplay we have now been enjoying for around a year or so with a few extra twists added. The most beneficial twist is the addition of objective mode. This places one team exclusively in the defensive position with a set of highly important targets to defend - exactly what they are changes from map to map but in gameplay terms they boil down to around two to four fairly tough objects in the gameworld of which at least one has to stay intact. The other team is placed on the offensive which normally would give them something of an advantage were it not for the fact that the maps are heavily designed to favour the defenders with multiple redoubts, covering lines of fire and usually a slight edge in material. This is clearly a new game mode intended primarily for clan play but still sufficiently fun for public games, especially once you get a few people beginning to gell as a team and covering each other appropriately. It is a worthwhile addition that spices up the gameplay without deviating from it greatly.

Try not to see these from this angle, it hurts.

Next in the twists is the new weaponry, one or two new personal firearms inluding shotguns for British engineers and throwing knives for the commandos. Both are lethal and used correctly garner instant kills. There are also new vehicles with both sides featuring a heavily armed and armoured tank. The Germans have the Sturmtiger which is bloody murder on tracks. The naval cannon has a tremendous blast radius making it lethal to infantry and quite deadly to tanks as well. Its sole limitations are a very small arc of fire it can traverse making manoeuvering of the tank crucial to line up your shot and a low ammunition supply. The American variant is a much more rounded version with a slightly less dangerous cannon and a secondary machinegunner mount. It's great for assaults because it packs enough wallop to destroy most fixed gun emplacements first shot but it is slow and again has a more limited traversal arc.

Planes feature too with fast jets and rocket planes. Almost all carry unguided missiles and most have guns also - they are sufficiently fast that the smaller ones can race past AA emplacements faster than they can track them. Fortunately while they pack a hefty punch they have light armour and can be shot down fairly quickly - if you can land a hit.

The Allied heavy tank, quite a decent vehicle.

You should be seeing a pattern here - powerful weapons all still limited in some fashion so as to not be overly powerful. But the gameplay balancing is definitely at the high side with a lot of lethality being useable. This is great when you are attacking as the feel of blasting hapless enemies into the air with a Sturmtiger is wonderful, it just isn't fun being on the receiving end. There is precious little you can do besides work hard to avoid looking down the business end of these weapons - this isn't a big change from the core game where battleships and the like were just as deadly in the right hands but the profusion of overly deadly weapons is a little disturbing. It means the emphasis is a little less on skillful playing and more on blasting away because with many of the deadlier vehicles, close enough is indeed good enough.

Plane voyages can be dull when you are just a trooper.
Of course you should always keep an eye on the planes health...

The maps have all been designed to have forced choke points but usually there is an alternative route so that these rarely become stalemates as one team or the other manoeuvers behind the lines and causes some havoc. In many respects the maps are excellent pieces of work which encourage a fluidity of play across them as flags trade hands regularly over the course of a match. What aids greatly in this is the amphibious vehicles which allow extra tatical diversity by preventing bridges from being the be all and end all attack route - but they don't carry enough heavy weaponry to be overwhelming. Another excellent addition is the mobile spawn point in a troop plane. Players can parachute behind enemy lines rapidly with this - assuming the plane survives long enough to get behind those lines. Already we have seen nifty uses of the plane including landing it above an objective to allow reinforcements to spawn in rapidly and again used correctly it prevents stalemates from developing.

Part of the Gothic line defences.
Quite a commanding view but the allies can sneak in under this gun.

There is a lot to like about this expansion pack and it is worth the asking price with one caveat - this is nothing more or less in gameplay terms than the original game. If you like the original game and want more of it then this satisfies your every need. Those looking for more than essentially light tweaking of the gameplay should really look to those excellent freely available modifications like Desert Combat or Edge of Destruction which offer considerably more content than this expansion pack.

The troop transport plane dropping a troop. The trooper is that black dot
to the left of the rifle because he hasn't opened his parahute yet.

Other downsides include the fact that this pack does nothing to either the graphics or audio capabilities of the game. This isn't a huge downside as the game is pretty impressive in it's default state just a little disappointing. Hands down the worst aspect of this is the requirement of the 1.45 patch and the infernal disc protection scheme it brings. It seems that EA and Dice have changed the protection to force you to have the appropriate disc for the map you are playing. Thus if you play a vanilla Battlefield 1942 map then the game will ask for the original game install disc, Road to Rome maps require the Road to Rome disc and the Secret Weapons maps require their disc too. Worse yet every time the map changes then the game will insist on the appropriate disc even if you launched the game from a different disc.

Some of the incidental detail is quite amazing.
Here is a statue in Essen that is purely decorative.

It is annoying. It is stupid in that it is penalising legal game owners far more than the pirates who are very likely to find and use a no disc utility of some description and frankly is a huge black mark against this expansion pack. If you have three CD drives on your computer then you could happily play on servers with a wide map rotation but for everyone else there is going to be a whole lot of disc swapping going on. We at Gameplanet hope that EA realises this is a retrograde step and release a more sensible protection scheme in a future patch.

This cannot happen, yet is in the opening movie.
What gives?