Battlefield 1942 is set during World War II, and gives you the opportunity to participate in key battles in that war in large multiplayer games of up to 64 players.  Four theaters from that war will be represented: Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific.  Each theater will have more four maps included, for a total of 16, representing famous battles in those theaters such as Kursk, Midway, Guadalcanal, and El Alemain. 

You'll be able to select from one of five different character classes (medic, assault, scout, anti-tank, and engineer) when entering the game.  Each class has access to different personal weapons, and comes with its own unique strengths and weaknesses.  Regardless of which class is selected, once in the game you'll be able to man any of 35 authentic vehicles which include tanks, aircraft, and even ships.  You can man the AA guns on a carrier to fight off enemy air attacks, then jump into a fighter and take off from the carrier, strafe enemy positions, land at an airstrip, and then hop into a tank.  Phew!  The larger vehicles such as bombers can be crewed by several players at once, so a bomber can take off with players in the pilot, bombardier, and gunner positions.

Since realism has been thrown out the window, Battlefield 1942 isn't a realistic simulator of WWII combat.  That's OK, though, because the game is a heck of a lot of fun.  EA was running a hands-on demo of the Wake Island map at E3 and the game looked fantastic.  It features a new proprietary graphics engine named Refractor 2, which provides a fully 3D world with landscape features such as rolling hills, and authentic looking vehicles and soldiers.  The gameplay itself is a fun free-for-all that provides players with so many options, that each game is probably a completely different experience.  At E3, I started aboard a ship and began by bombarding the shoreline with the ship's main games.  I then hopped into a Higgens boat and stormed the shoreline, borrowed a jeep parked behind the shore batteries, and proceeded to an island base to upgrade to a tank.  I can hardly wait to tryout the other maps!

While the focus of Battlefield 1942 is on multiplayer, there is a single player component.  Instead of a campaign game filled with scripted enemies and triggered events, the single player levels are populated with AI bots given the complete freedom to make things challenging for the player.  The single player game should play out differently every time, giving it a high degree of replayability not found in a lot of single player action games.

When can you get in on the action?  Battlefield 1942 will be released for the PC in the summer of 2002, with an Xbox version slated for the end of the year.