Battlefield 2142 demo preview

Graphics

The minimum spec for BF2142 is thus:

Pentium 4 / Athlon 1.7GHz or equivalent; 512MB RAM; 128MB graphics card supporting Pixel Shader 2; 950MB of space for the demo.

The recommended spec is a little higher:

Pentium 4 / Athlon 3.0GHz or equivalent; 1.5GB RAM; 256MB graphics card supporting Pixel Shader 2; Sound Blaster X-Fi.

The game uses a slightly modified version of the Battlefield 2 engine - if you can play that game happily, you'll definitely be able to get down with this new version. Whilst developers claim that this is a 'new game', it's hard to disguise the fact that it is BF2 with some different models.

Annoyingly, the game still doesn't support widescreen resolutions within game - you have to hack the .cfg if you want to get it to work. In this day and age, lack of support for 1680x1050 and 1920x1200 is inexcusable.

DICE offers you a fair amount of different options to play with. We've taken a some comparative screenshots with all the details set to High, then Medium, then Low, so you can see the difference between running this game on a high end rig and one that's more run of the mill. You can click these for bigger versions.

High:
At high detail, you can see that the textures are detailed and crisp. 2x AA is enabled by default here. The smoke and fire effect is pretty neat, although the grass leaves a little to be desired.

Medium:
At medium settings, the texturing takes a heck of a hit, with the buggy looking pretty ropey. The fire effects are pretty similar, but the ground texture clearly lacks any kind of depth.

Low:
When the settings are dropped to low, the whole thing looks absolutely awful.

Closing thoughts

We are left feeling a little disappointed by the demo. The graphics don't look too great, the gameplay feels slow and somewhat unfinished, and the depth of the game is yet to reveal itself to us. We can only echo what Djpuk says over in the bit-tech forum thread:

"Is it just me or has anybody else been a little disappointed with the 2142 demo? I think that when the unlocks come in to play it is bound to improve the game no end but after all the hype I was kinda... I dunno ... expecting more!"