First-person shooting has all but dominated online gaming over the past few years. Though massively multiplayer role-playing has been catching up, it doesn't come anywhere close to matching the success of the online fragfest. Counterstrike, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake III, Unreal Tournament, Tribes 2...the list goes on for days.

But despite their subtle (and not so subtle) differences, nearly every first-person shooter out there plays the same way. You start off sucking, then you learn the maps and the weaponry, then you dominate. And without fail, all of these games take place largely on the ground.

The fact is, very few confrontations in real war are so one dimensional, yet EA's Battlefield 1942 is really the first game that seems to recognize this (Digital Illusions, the folks behind the game, came close with an earlier title, Codename Eagle). Say goodbye to terra firma and hello to the Y-axis - this is a whole new level of online first-person fragging, and though it's not without its missteps, it's about as close to the front lines as you're gonna get while staring at your monitor.

As the name suggests, the game is set against the backdrop of World War II. Allied and Axis forces are engaged in different theaters all over the globe. BF 1942 focuses on the pivotal battles in the different regions, such as the Battle of Midway, Iwo Jima, and even the infamous Omaha Beach.

Battlefield 1942 understands that a good army is a balanced one. There are five types of soldier to choose from: Scout, Assault, Anti-Tank, Medic, and Engineer. Each has different equipment and can perform certain functions that the others cannot. The medic can heal, the engineer can repair vehicles and lay mines, the scout can snipe and call in airstrikes, the anti-tank soldier hefts a bazooka, and the assault soldier is an all-purpose grunt with a payload of grenades.

You can switch your specialty while you are dead and waiting to respawn, which comes in handy. For instance, if you were a scout that just got run over by a tank, you could respawn in as an anti-tank guy and try to exact revenge. Because of this there is no one prevailing soldier type - all five come in handy.

However, once you're behind the wheel of one of the game's 35 vehicles, your class becomes less important than your driving/piloting/navigation skills. Tanks, jeeps, and half-tracks dominate land, battleships, submarines and aircraft carriers patrol the seas, and fighters and bombers rule the skies. Everything is drawn to scale - you can actually get lost just walking around on the aircraft carrier.

It's here where BF 1942 really earns its stripes. The transition between on-foot and vehicular combat is seamless. You can hop into a jeep, zip out to a contested control point, hop out of the jeep and hurl some grenades at a few enemies, then grab an empty tank to hold your position. Next, you might want to hop out of the tank and man an AA gun to take out one of the fighters flying overhead, or make your way to an airfield and nab a plane for some dogfighting, or maybe even respawn on an aircraft carrier and DRIVE it. The possibilities are really quite endless.

The big problem here is the weak enemy AI. Though the game allows you to distribute more or less of your system's processing power to AI (a nice touch), it doesn't make much of a difference. The game has no scripting at all, which makes for a much more varied, free-form experience, but also means that enemy AI often just runs about with little rhyme or reason. They're really easy to kill and are not creative in the way they approach the game. Think of the single-player as little more than training for multiplayer and it makes more sense.

Besides, once you've gotten sucked into the incredibly fluid, dynamic experience that is BF 1942 online, you won't care much about the single-player letdowns. Instead, you'll be sucking down pints of coffee to keep you awake as you test out more strategies late into the night. This is a very, very compelling game and shouldn't be missed by those with good rigs and plenty of time to kill.