Battlefield 1942: The Road to Rome

This multi-player focused expansion pack gives you more of what you demand from the original Battlefield 1942, including more maps, vehicles, and fighting forces. The Road to Rome focuses exclusively on the key Italian and Sicilian campaigns of WWII. Each map comes with highly detailed environments such as Italian houses, Mediterranean trees, and even the Monte Cassino Monastery.

Here is a brief description of the new six maps.

Battle for Anzio: The Axis are attacking the American base at the beginning of a canal. There are six strongholds to try and capture and plenty of planes and tanks to use.

Battle for Salerno: A king of the hill type of map where the forces start at the bottom left and top right of the map. Even if you take control of the top of the hill, you cannot spawn there. Making that point is strategic because there are plenty of stationary artillery and anti-aircraft guns ti fire on the enemy.

Monte Cassino: The Axis troops are dug in deep upon top a hill with an old monastery. The Allies attack, and try to hold the five strongholds. The Allies use a lot of tanks for their upward battle, while the Axis fight back with anti-tank cannons and a few tanks.

Monte Santa Croce: This one has a canal that runs like an upside-down Y. The Axis and Allies fight over the seven strongholds at the bottom. There are plenty of planes, tanks and long-range fighting.

Operation Baytown: A map with a ton of water. Both the Allies and the Axis have three strongholds, which make up their bases. All of them can be captured. There are many possible strategies due to the geography and the amount of planes and tanks.

Operation Husky: An assault on Sicily where the Allied forces paratroop on a beach and push and try to capture three strongholds using planes, tanks and snipers.

New vehicles at your disposal are:

British Mosquito: A single passenger twin-engine bomber with light armor and a large payload.

US M3 Grant: A Medium armor tank with two positions: A main cannon and an anti-personnel turret.

US GMC: This is an M3 Halftrack modified with an anti-tank cannon. It can carry up to 3 passengers, including a rear machine gunner. (I found that gun only useful if fleeing from a firefight…my personal opinion.)

British AT 25 Pdr: Field gun used by the Allies as a stationary anti-tank cannon.

German BF-110: A dual engine bomber with a large payload and additional rear gunner position. German Strumgeschutz: A medium armor tank-buster with an additional machine gunner position.

Italian M11-39 Carro Armato: A medium armor anti-infantry tank with a main cannon and anti-infantry turret.

German Pak 40: The Axis stationary anti-tank weapon. (Works great on blowing infantry to bits as well)

Italian LVCP: The Italian version of the Higgins boat.

Breda Modello: An Italian assault machine gun.

Sten SMG: A French medic sub machine gun.

Rifle Bayonet: All engineers on R2R are equipped with a bayonet on their rifles.

Okay, with that all out of the way, Road to Rome supports up to 64 gamers (on select maps), playing as several infantry classes, controlling many weapons available to the Axis and Allies, and commanding numerous land vehicles, ships, and aircraft. Much like the original BF 1942. I noticed that the maps do seem larger than that of the predecessor. The Road to Rome's large maps are clearly laid out to encourage both tank and infantry skirmishes. The maps have many open areas to travel across, which makes having a vehicle very nice to get you to the action quickly. On the other side, there are plenty of smaller enclosed areas like bombed out villages that make the infantry battles quite fun. Those broken down buildings make great spots to set up an ambush or pick off men from afar with a sniper rifle. There also seems to be more of the stationary guns like machine gun nests and anti aircraft guns to go around.

The key elements to this new expansion are the new maps, vehicles and weapons. Unfortunately, if you like the campaign side of the game, there is nothing really new here. There is a single-player mode that has the 6 new maps in a battle style format. There is no scripting involved so each new game should be a bit different. The main reason for getting this title is plain and simple. New maps and toys for the MP games. It does come with the 1.25 patch to get you up to speed on some bug fixes in the original, but low and behold there is already a new release 1.3 at the Battlefield 1942 website.  So if you have already downloaded that, which I’m sure any true fan has this patch on the CD means nothing to you. But for a MSRP of 20 bucks, you really can’t miss.

All that being said the quality of the maps are fantastic to say the least. The Refractor 2 engine does a superb job of rendering the action. So if you are looking for quality and not quantity, I'm sure any fan will be satisfied. Personally I like both! Not to say that I am not happy, quite honestly I love the expansion, I just want more. So I will be looking forward to another expansion if one does come out! My personal feeling is that looking at the big picture on what you are really getting in this expansion, it could have been easily downloaded like the newest patch is. I would gladly pay top dollar for a game that would continue to grow rather than keep paying for additional expansions. Again for 20 bucks, it's still worth it especially if you take advantage of the online play.

This review was on the expansion and not the entire game. If you are new to BF 1942 head over to Kevin Krause’s review to get the skinny on the game. I did not want to restate what he has already said in his wonderful review.

The original Battlefield 1942 game is required to play The Road to Rome.

Gameplay: 8.5
Nothing really has changed form the original. The game itself is a lot of fun, but still glitches in smooth gameplay. I would have hoped the patch would fix this but not so true. What I found a bit odd is that actually sometimes the game played smoother on Multiplayer than it did in a single player game, go figure.

Graphics: 9.0
The graphics are very nice. You get close to the trees and they don’t turn into green criss-cross blobs. The proprietary Refractor 2 engine delivers exquisite graphics that are probably the most realistic of the genre.

Sound: 8.5
I was very fond of most of the sounds in the original. I was fortunate enough not to have some of the sound card issues that were experienced in the original by other players. To my understanding the patch has fixed this.

Difficulty: Medium
You can toggle the difficulty settings quite a bit and adjust CPU time devoted to the AI. The hardest part of the game is definitely taking on other gamers in Multiplayer. That is where the game really shines.

Concept: 9 
I absolutely love a FPS that not only allows you to command various vehicles, but to actually do the same in Multiplayer games…Very Cool.

Overall:  8.5
 The new maps and vehicles are worth the 20 bucks. An Italian or French campaign would have been nice but the battle maps are quite fun. If you like the Multiplayer games this is a must have.