Battlefield: 1943

Electronic Arts has their hands in every video game genre imaginable.  And they're constantly creating new genres.  Avant-garde and seemingly omnipotent, EA has grown into the largest video game publisher in the world.

Battlefield 1943 is an X-Box Live Arcade game downloadable on the X-Box Live marketplace.  It takes the familiar combat of World War II era first person shooters, and relocates it to tropical, pseudo-paradisiac Pacific Islands.



The game features the Frostbite Engine from Battlefield:  Bad Company, which fully integrates completely destructible environments.  Players will quickly learn that you can't hide behind any wall for too long.

For fans of any of the Battlefield series, the game is very easily playable with a low learning curve.  Players find themselves on the side of the Allies or the Japanese.  The two teams square off on either side of the map, and coalesce in the middle to fight over several strategic checkpoints.  Jeeps, airplanes, tanks, aistrikes, and boats are all attainable to convenience some players and destroy others.

The game is class-based, featuring only 3 classes:  infantry, rifleman, and scout.  Each is very unique, and offers different weapon-sets and tactical strategies for achieving victory. 

Battlefield 1943 received an 83 out of 100 from Metacritic, and is recorded as having the highest sales within the first 24 hours of its release, and was the highest-grossing Arcade game of 2009.

In my opinion, this is the best game offered on X-Box Live Arcade.  It's very much its own game, and not just a shadow of something more expensive.  It's exceedingly fun and infinitely replayable.  Of course, like most shooters, they're much more fun if all your friends are playing.