The coding monkeys at EA have not been idle since they hammered out Battlefield 2142. They’ve had raw community demand injected into their brains and, in between coincidentally reproducing the King James Bible, they’ve crafted a booster pack which is now waiting on the fat end of your internet, as occurred with Battlefield 2.

Assuming you’ve been asleep for the last year or so, Battlefield 2142 is to Battlefield 2 roughly what Battlefield Vietnam was to Battlefield 1942, which is to say, a rejigging and enhancement of the Battlefield 2 game engine with a new setting, units and rules to create a totally new game. Come 2142, says EA, Pan Asian Coalition forces and the EU military will have come to blows over the last habitable bits of the earth in the face of an encroaching ice age-which translates, practically speaking, into a futuristic take on the familiar battlefield idea: loads of people, tanks, aircraft, turrets and a massive map to put them in and shoot them, studded with control points to capture. Kill everyone enough times or capture all the points, you win. Battlefield 2142 managed to liven the formula up with Titan mode, in which the objective is changed; now, you have to destroy the other side’s eponymous hovering battle station, while defending your own. It added indoor combat to the wide-open maps, and introduced some new tactical decisions: should you stay and defend, take a jump pod and attack, or go capture a silo (titan mode’s equivalent of control points) to lob missiles at the enemy’s Titan while they’re all busy in yours?

While it revolves around disputes over natural resources, it’ll surprise few that this isn’t the eighties miner’s strike sim we’ve all been waiting for. Northern Strike places us a few years into the war, in the midst of a PAC push for energy resources buried in northern Europe’s ice fields. More importantly, it places two new vehicles, three new maps, a new game mode, ten new unlocks and ten new awards (allegedly; I can only see six) in our grasp. Now this, as expansion packs go, is a bit skimpy. But this, see, this is a booster pack, and it goes for £5.99, less than your average expansion pack. Of course, if you’re considering plucking this from the ether and you’re new to BF2142, you’ll need to add the price of the full game to that as it’s not stand-alone. Long-term Battlefield gamers may recall the Euro Force and Armoured Fury booster packs for Battlefield 2; this is the same deal. Also like these boosters, this isn’t going to be in shops. You’ll need to experience the pleasant torture of EA Link, their (somewhat badly phrased) answer to Steam, in order to obtain this pack, so anyone still hobbling about on a slow internet connection is in for a long night. Finally, those who prefer their opponents A.I. controlled will be dismayed but likely unsurprised to learn that bot support is not a part of this pack.

Possibly the most interesting thing in this pack is the maps. Liberation of Leipzig is a city map, of course, and is set in an inky blue night assault (oops, another teamkill because I can’t see a friendly name...) that makes for a bit of variation. However it’s the smallest and most limited of the maps, and with nothing really new , the map is not that special. Gameplay is, despite the nighttime setting, similar in its chaotic nature to Belgrade or Fall of Berlin but the greater openness contributes positively. Bridge at Remagen on the other hand is clearly from the same design stable that produced Wake Island 2007 for BF2; a BF1942 favourite redone as a 22^nd century city at war. I’ll let you decide whether this is EA’s creativity atrophying or a case of giving fans what they want, but it plays well regardless, with the bridge predictably acting as a focus and interesting choke point. As a larger map, both assault lines and titan game modes are supported; Titan combat among skyscrapers is good for that nice 3^rd dimension of fighting but not as different as I might have liked, and assault lines on a 32-player sized map is especially good. Lastly, the Titan dock map Port Bavaria represents, for me, the high point of the pack, with a dense, mazelike assortment of buildings, a pair of hangers for close fighting and some open ground, overall playing not unlike a larger, more interesting, less brown version of Tunis Harbour, accommodating all play styles well. However, it’s a bit much with 64 players.

All three are pretty much infantry focused, so there are sadly no tanks, the walkers and gunships are few and there are many APCs and air transports. The APCs and jeeps have gotten a new extra-snowy paint job, which is a nice touch, and player models also have slightly altered winter camouflage, but they still look much the same overall and both sides are still just a bit too similar to each other.

A brave approach has been employed with the added vehicles; rather than the like-for-like approach in the rest of the game, the new units are asymmetric, with the EU Goliath acting as the tortoise to the PAC Hachimoto’s hare. Interestingly, both are labelled Infantry Fighting Vehicles, but their approaches are diametric opposites, one soaking damage up like a ballistic sponge, the other relying on agility to avoid it. Also, while the EU can nick a Hachimoto, PAC can’t use Goliaths. The Goliath is a ponderous, lumbering, self-healing, resupplying, health-giving, rootin’, tootin’, Asian shootin’ support vehicle, trundling inexorably along like an armed glacier, spitting explosive death at all who oppose it. Its pace is slow enough that EU soldiers can advance behind it, using it for cover and resupply as troops today do with their APCs. In practice, it’s formidable but perhaps not as much of a masonry commode as it is clearly intended to be, seeming especially vulnerable to rail turrets and motion mines. Opposing it is the Hachimoto, a sprightly hoverjeep that will perish with one well-aimed anti-vehicle rifle shot, and has none of the Goliath’s abilities. None, that is, except spitting explosive death, which despite its light armour it is very good at. This hyperactive paper hovertank skates around like Torville and Dean’s bloody revenge, chaingunning, shelling, missiling and mowing down EU troops with gay abandon. Just don’t stop, as you can be sniped very easily from the sides, and don’t whatever you do crash into another one or you’ll have three teamkills on your hands!

All three maps have familiar prefabricated buildings, but many have seemingly been given a slight visual overhaul, with more of a battle-ravaged look to them, missing windows and lumps of walls. It would have been nice to see more than a couple of new building types and layouts, though; for a game where the community doesn’t really have a chance to play anything but a handful of maps, especially if they want the points for their unlocks, the maps, especially city maps, can all seem samey. This pack doesn’t really deal with that, especially compared to the superbly fresh US-themed maps delivered in the BF2 Armoured Fury pack.

Speaking of unlocks, there is one new unlock per skill branch per class, plus a squad leader upgrade and a personal ability unlock. Scouts can get a sniper decoy or a boost to the optical camouflage while assaulters get an ammo boost for their unlocked underbarrel weapon or smoke grenades that give off a radar-pulse on detonation. Engineers get motion mine bait or a clip size boost for the SMG, and support class get sticky explosive shotty ammo or an infantry sensor that works like the engineer’s vehicle sensor. Of course, to access all these you must first have unlocked everything below them, including the weapons. Squad leaders get a device for speeding up respawns and the added personal ability is a fall damage and stamina recharge time reduction personified by, erm, boots with shock absorbers. Without having exhaustively tried everything, I can’t say for sure, but for me, none of this is frankly worth a moment’s consideration. It might be handy occasionally, yes, but I hoped for better. New weapons, fine; allow some swapping of equipment between classes, OK; I can see things like the explosive ammo and radar grenades being good, but the likes of clip size increases and rate reducers seem awfully lacking in ideas. Where’s the multi-shot grenade launcher? Where’s the Dragunov-like light sniper rifle? Where’s the machine pistol sidearm upgrade?

Also something of an anticlimax is the new gamemode, Conquest Assault Lines. This, really, is a tweaking of Conquest mode, whereby you cannot capture the enemy’s main base until you hold all the other points. So that one guy, who always sneaks off and captures the enemy’s least defended point; now, he can stop you losing the match outright. This is a good idea in my book, as it effectively maintains the polarity of the battle, meaning that situation where your whole army went and captured all their central points just as an air transport of their crack hit squad captured your base, putting you in the middle of two enemy-controlled bases full of tanks and walkers, a thing of the past. But for all its sensible merits, there’s no very valid justification for calling it a new game mode; this should simply replace Conquest mode. Doubtless some players will disagree with me on that (probably the ones in the aircraft) but they can rest easy knowing that only Northern Strike maps support this mode.

I should mention, for the sake of completeness, that there are some new medals and ribbons and pins and things included. Of course, these have no actual use beyond giving lump sums of points for ranking up and unlocking stuff, so they’re obviously desirable but hardly a required goal. Unless you’re a completist too, in which case, you’ve already bought this, right?

Overall, the lack of the new vehicles on vanilla maps means that the only real boosting going on, outside the new unlocks, which are useable in all maps, is the variety of the maplists. A decco at the server browser shows that there’s still plenty of non-Northern Strike servers out there so don’t feel that you’ll be unable to play without this. On the other hand, if you’ve been playing BF2142 since it appeared, there’s really no reason not to get this, especially as by now you’ve likely got all the unlocks and learned all the tricks and routes there are to know. For a game where variety for ranked play is rarer than rocking horse poo, you may feel six of your earth pounds is a reasonable price for more to see, do, shoot and be shot by.