A friend introduced me to Battlefield 2142 for the PC this weekend. I have to say, I was glad to be able to use the PC for gaming again, and had some interesting finds about returning to the keyboard and mouse. For starters it looks like, for the mouse, my brain has switched preferences from inverted Y 'Look' to standard. While, for controllers, I use inverted. No clue why, I just know that I preferred inverted when I used to play Quake and Unreal. I had forgotten how much I loved the KB/M setup though.

As far as the game goes, I actually liked it quite a bit. It is a slow paced shooter and you can't run around in turbo mode as you can in some other games. You do have a sprint button, but this only lasts for about 15 or so seconds before you get tired and slow back down. The game relies heavily on vehicles to get you around the map.

Gameplay is very strategic. There was something like 64 players in one game that I played in, and you have smaller squads divided up inside your team. There is a commander that will place checkpoints and give orders for what each squad should be doing. Your icons above each players head is a different color for each squad. You can actually choose a setting to make people that aren't in your squad semi-transparent for further clarification.

I have not played it long enough to be clear about the weapons, but there are the standard sniper rifles and assault rifles and such. There are EMP bombs that will disable tanks, vehicles, and super large walking destructo-machines. There is a weapons system that my friend was trying to explain to me where, from what I gathered, there is a sort of character building aspect where you can get new weapons as you build your character.

As far as the gametypes go, there is a conquest type gametype where you must capture all of the spawnpoints in the map and overrun your opponent. There is also one where you have two large floating shielded titan fortresses; the goal is to wear down the shields by controlling missile silos down below. All the while you are protecting your satellite uplinks so you can keep your battlefield intel going. One thing I noticed was that you can pre-select your spawn point each time you are respawning.

I could see myself getting into this game, The squad aspect of it was great in my opinion. Having a small squad when there's that many players in one game was quite cool. I haven't had a reason so far to start playing PC games, but this might change my mind.