There are dozens of games set during World War Two, but this latest game in the Battlefield series is rather unusual.

For one, there is no single-player game in which you pit yourself against a series of carefully designed missions; instead it requires users to go online and compete against other human players.

Secondly, you can't go out and buy it in shops. It's currently available to download on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 consoles, with a PC version due later in the year. We'll review the PC version properly when it arrives, but to get a taste of what's to come we tried the Xbox 360 version.

The game sees you playing as either an American marine or a soldier of the Japanese Imperial Navy, fighting for control of islands in the Pacific during the Second World War. Each side comprises up to 12 human players, and each team has a limited supply of 'tickets'. When a player on the team dies this number decreases, and when the tickets run out your team loses.

The game isn't as boring a process of attrition as this might sound, however. Each island has five strategic points marked with a flag, and capturing one of these increases the rate at which the opposition's tickets deplete. Capture three, four or all five, and they'll soon lose the game. This makes capturing the majority of the flags, and defending them from attack, vital to winning.

This sounds simple, but there's enough to the game to keep it from becoming formulaic. You can choose to play as one of three types of soldier, depending on whether you choose to snipe from a distance or rush up to the enemy, and the islands are littered with vehicles to use.

Jeeps allow you to dash across the map, tanks are massively powerful but surprisingly vulnerable to some attackers, while aircraft are trickier to control but extremely deadly. The island's scenery is destructible, so the landscape changes as you fight across it: tanks knock over fortifications, while air strikes can raze entire areas of cover to the ground.

There's no denying that Battlefield 1943 is a limited game: there are only three islands to fight on, and only two game modes, the team battle described here and an Air Superiority aircraft-only game played on a separate map and currently only available on the Xbox 360.

On the other hand, the game is priced accordingly: it costs just £10 on the PS3, or 1,200 Microsoft Points (again, around £10) on Xbox 360. Perhaps more importantly, the simple game structure makes it really easy to pick up and play.

If you have a suitable console, it's a brilliantly simple game that'll keep you engaged for hours – and if not, look out for our review of the PC version later this year.