"It's like every other military game ever made, only with really bad balancing problems."

Okay, seriously: is there any online gamer out there who hasn't played some form of Half-Life or Counter-Strike? The games are so popular that it's ridiculous. However, there's a good reason that both games are popular: they're both tremendous achievements in video gaming. Battlefield 2 is basically a more "realistic" version of Counter-Strike (either 1.6 or Source, doesn't matter) that includes weapons and a class system. I know a guy at my school who is obsessed with this game, and I mean obsessed. He has some sort of special mouse with some kind of counterweight system in it to make it fit his hand perfectly so he can line up that headshot every time (I beat him every time at TF2 though, which is a far superior game anyway). He's pestered me to try this game for about a month now, so I decided to give it a whirl.

Graphically, the game's pretty good. They were alright for its time, but some jaggies are fairly obvious as you play, and the distinctions between different classes are almost non-existent, a problem which is common in many shooters of this type, but was finally fixed, hopefully for good, in Team Fortress 2. The guns look like their real-life versions, and the people look like people. The vehicles kind of take a hit here, though, because some of them (read: Jet) look nothing like their counterparts.

Infantry combat in this game is incredibly boring. I know, it's hard to make a game based around shooting people in the face boring, but this game manages to do so. It takes like two shots to the chest to kill anybody with any gun, which can be a real problem when the game has a positive hit-to -miss ratio that would make Soldat's look good. If that last sentence made no sense to you, I mean that when you hit somebody, there's about an 85% chance it'll do damage, and a 15% chance they'll bleed, but no damage will actually be done. This is a serious flaw, but according to my friend, it used to be a lot worse before the proportionally recent patches.

The main flaw that I can see with the infantry combat is the fact that it's too realistic. Yeah, I know, everybody seems to want realism these days, but I just don't get it. BF2 boils down to rock-paper-scissors-nuke when it comes down to soldier-on-soldier fighting. If you're a sniper class, from long range you're unstoppable. If you're a medium-range player (I think it's called Soldier, at this point it's all running together from all the shooters I've played), you beat everybody at medium-range. If you're assault or whatever the game calls the heavy weapons category, you beat everybody at, you guessed it, close range. It boils down to luck, mostly. This isn't one of those games where skill determines much; rather, everyone's skills seem to plateau around ten hours of playing time, and then from there it comes down to position on the field. This is similar to Counter-Strike, but at least in Counter-Strike there were some medium-range-specialized weapons that were pretty good at long range (AK-74/47 and M4 come to mind), while the medium-range weapons in Battlefield 2 are about as useful as the egg in RE4 at long range.

The "nuke" that I was referring to in my award-winning analogy was the vehicles. Again, here comes the realism thing again; much like in real life, if you're not in a vehicle, or the anti-tank class when a vehicle comes up, you might as well unplug your keyboard, because you're screwed five times to Tuesday. Of course, if you're the anti-tank class, you can totally obliterate the vehicle with your slightly-overpowered rocket launcher, and beam in relief as you realize you finally got a kill because the weapons you get in the Anti-Tank class are (yay, here comes another simile) about as useful as the Pistol in Doom.

I didn't get much time in as a Commander, mostly because I was too busy getting shot trying desperately to succeed in a game designed for people like my aforementioned friend who have $150 mice that they use specifically for Battlefield 2. I'm not a big fan of calling in airstrikes or doing all that Risk-esque stuff in online shooters because, frankly, if I wanted to do that I'd be playing World in Conflict or another RTS game, not some shooter that tries unrelentingly to be the Half-Life of online shooters. However, this attempted revolution only succeeds in pleasing a niche group of gamers who want to replicate time in the Armed Forces without actually getting shot at. Most of the fun this game has is actually unrealized, in the form of mini-games. My favorite part was probably organized Jeep races on private servers with a few friends of mine. Now THAT's entertainment. Also, I couldn't finish a review without talking about this game's community. Like all gaming communities, they basically feed off of old 4chan memes (Chocolate Rain!) and bad jokes (Chuck Norris!). But, other than that, they're alright, if not a bit immature.

Overall, Battlefield 2 is a fun, yet frustrating experience. There were some moments where I actually felt that I was having fun, only to be shot by a sniper glitching through solid wall. That's what this game feels like: fun on the other side of a solid wall, with some trying to clip through, but most just staying the hell away from. In conclusion, I just think it would have been better if they, say, took all the vehicles out, balanced out the weapons, made the maps about thirty times smaller, and took out the stupid "hey, your weapons suck unless you've played the game for about twenty hours" thing. Oh, wait, they've already made a game like that, it's called Counter-Strike Source. I think I'll go play that for a while now.

6.5/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 01/18/08

Game Release: Battlefield 2 (US, 06/21/05)