Battlefield Vietnam

"Sloppy and Unfinished."

Battlefield 1942 and its expansions broke the guidelines for todays first person shooters. Vechicle combat combined with Infantry and Piloting made it GOTY material. Now with EA wondering what to release next, they decide to take the battlefield to the Vietnamese conflict. The release date was very surprising to many BF gamers because it wasn't a long while after the secret weapons expansion and 1.6 patch was released for BF1942. So was BF:V a hit or another one of EA's failures? Here's my opinion.

Graphics

Stunning the only word to describe the graphics. The lush jungles and beautiful landscapes of Vietnam make you want to simply stare at the scenery instead of fight. Evem with texture details and other graphical settings on low, it stills looks amazing.

Single Player

Once AGAIN, the bots are stupid. Their is now NO excuse after the poor bot AI in BF1942 to include the same dumb bots in BF:V. The bots run around and half the time they go off on their own and shoot rocks and the other half try to attack. At least sometimes when you call for a pickup they stop, but most times no. Hey, I guess its that way online too so what the heck :/ The bottom line for this is that MANY were dissapointed with BF's poor single player and Digital Illusions shows no effort to fix this error.

Basic Online Gameplay

Now since this is an Online oriented game, your gameplay will vary from server to server. But there are many things I can touch on. For example, BUGS BUGS and MORE BUGS. Why can't Digital Illusions fix these bugs before release. Do they not test the game? How could they miss all these bugs on release!! Here are some of the MANY bugs.

- Mortar sometimes disappears when deployed
- Network code STILL buggy - open servers throw the error of ''Server Full!''
- Audio is muffled or at almost 0 volume with any EAX setting - even with sound fix to .con file
- When Punji Sticks are placed on a static mesh, they seem to fall through the mesh when ran over.
- Scroll bar doesn't work right. You click and hold the down arrow, and it just scolls down by one.
- Lots of randon crashes for many types of PC's

Those are just the tip of the HUGE Iceberg. That is absurd and simply sloppy of EA and DI! However, I do think that they will evenually patch this up. BF1942 was like this on release if not worse. Its still very sloppy and you definately get the ''rushed game'' syndrome when you load this game up. I do like the music though, thats a big plus for me, I love driving around with the music cranked to 70's anti-war music :D

Buy or Wait

Wait. This game is a waste of your money right now, your better off waiting until the price goes down and EA patches this up.

This game was rushed, its obvious and EA tends to do this. They have done with with Renegade, Earth and Beyond, MOH:AA and the list goes on. I am giving this game such a low score simply because their is no excuse this time around for such poor gameplay and sloppy netcode. Maybe next time they might learn that maybe testing this game in and out IS the way to go...or else it ends up like this garbage.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 03/22/04