First Strike is a
Star Wars mod for
Battlefield 2142. It features the Rebel Alliance and Galactic Empire as playable factions and has battles set both on the ground and in space, the latter inspired heavily by the X-Wing series of starfighter simulator games.
The First Strike mod has examples of the following tropes:
- 2-D Space: space maps are incredibly large, and also allow you to travel a great distance upwards and downwards, but for convenience's sake, ships start out at pretty much the same altitude, and seldom travel too far up or down.
- Artifact Title: the original developers having long since moved on to other projects, no one is around today to tell you why the mod is named "First Strike".
- Base on Wheels: the massive Sandcrawler on one of the Tattooine maps. Essentially a mobile fortress, she has a huge ramp that can be raised or lowered by its crew and is large enough to carry landspeeders inside its main bay. It has several decks to fight over, a built-in medical droid and ammo recharger, and, of course, allows players to respawn inside of her upon death. Oh, and she is litterally impervious to damage.
- Bee Hive Barrier: the Heavy Weapons class can deploy a half-dome that stops all energy weapons and projectiles and cannot be destroyed, but which will allow soldiers and vehicles to pass through it without difficulty.
- Berserk Button: Battlefield 2142 being a sequel to Battlefield 1942, lots of players thought the First Strike Mod was meant to be a sequel to Battlefield 1942's Star Wars mod, "Galactic Conquest". It wasn't; and at one point, you'd be permanently banned from the forums if you suggested to the devs they change the name to 'Galactic Conquest 2'.
- Some players also take offense at players using the Packered Mortar Gun as a litteral mortar, that is, firing its bolts over long range to bombard enemies, or upwards so that they come flying down upon enemies behind cover some distance ahead.
- BFG: lots of the weapons in the game. A couple of notable examples:
- Squad leaders can deploy tripod turbo lasers like the one set up to stop the Falcon in The Empire Strikes Back. These cannot be picked up or moved, will topple if placed wrong or on uneven ground, need to be hooked up to generators placed by Support class infantry to fire more than a few shots, and are destroyed fairly easily by weapons fire. They do, however, pack a serious punch against infantry and light vehicles, to the point where a frontal assault even by a whole squad of soldiers becomes a very deadly endavour, and if a heavy weapons class infantryman deploys a shield to cover most of the gun and gunner, but leaving the tip protruding through the shield to allow the weapon to fire at the enemy, you have yourself a fortress.
- Also, pretty much all the guns on capital ships, particularly the heaviest turrets on the Star Destroyer, each of which are the size of a small star ship.
- Boarding Party: the space map where the Imperials have to land ships on a large platform to seize the control points inside. Combines infantry ombat on board the station with a space battle between Rebel and Imperial fighters and capital ships outside.
- Cool Plane: the Sentinel class landing craft — a troop carrier and a gunship rolled into one — is arguably the best candidate. She is heavily armed, can take a lot of damage, and can pour out an infinite number of stormtroopers since dead Imperial players can spawn and respawn on board.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Rebel lasers are red, Imperial are green, at least when fired from fighters and star ships. In ground combat, laser bolts are mostly red, with various other colours such as green and blue thrown in.
- Death of a Thousand Cuts: the thought behind the "subconscious teamwork" approach to the gameplay. Light vehicles will take a bit of damage even from light weapons such as blasters, encouraging players to gang up on them rather than run away from them.
- Deflector Shields: the two freight ships in the game have dorsal and ventral deflection screens, which together protect the entire ship against damage, but last only so long and do not recharge once expended.
- Fragile Speedster: Speeder bikes and land speeders can move quickly, but their drivers are exposed to enemy fire and the vehicles can't take much damage. In space combat, pretty much all of the star fighters, especially the Imperial TIE Fighter and the Rebel A-Wing.
- Glass Cannon: the Mortar Freerunner, a large hover transport with a huge long-range mortar. Powerful, but still a large target that is fairly easy to hit for opposing bombers and tanks.
- I Want My Jet Pack: played very straight. Fans pestered the devs for playable Jedi and jetpacks for the longest time. Finally they changed a certain map so that you could break into a hovel and steal "bounty hunter" gear, complete with a jet pack. It was quickly taken back out as this basically broke the map, with players not playing to win the map, but instead fighting over the jet pack kit.
- Fanservice: in the living quarters of one of the Rebel bases in the game, there's a poster of a lightly clad Twi'lek woman.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: the Officers' pistols are notorious for not only being very powerful, but also for being 100% accurate even over large distances.
- Mile-Long Ship: all capital ships are rendered to scale, from the 300 meters Rebel Medium Transport to the 1600 meter Imperial Star Destroyer. Actually, the sheer size of the ships in space maps have led to players complaining that their fighters fly too slowly, even though they are way faster than the fighters in "vanilla 2142", simply because it takes them so long to fly from one end of these behemoths to the other.
- Robot Buddy: players can deploy astromech droids as well as small floating scanner and blaster droids to follow them around. There's playable Imperial Probe Droids as well.
- Shown Their Work: the devs have spent considerable time pouring over Star Wars material to make the mod as accurate and authentic as possible.
- Sighted Guns Are Low-Tech: averted. Lots of weapons in the game, even pistols and short-range shotgun-like weapons have aiming sights.
- Tree Top Town: the Endor map has an elaborate Ewok village, complete with bot Ewoks throwing rocks at Imperial intruders.
