Battlefield Vietnam

"Not nearly as good as it could have been."

When Battlefield 1942 came out, I remember spawning on a Destroyer and thinking "Wow, you can actually control these things?" Sure, it had its flaws, but it was a lot of fun. A year and a half later, with the release of BF:V, the wow factor of the vehicles was naturally gone. Before you go further into this review, consider that it is heavily compared to BF1942, because as you should know, it is its predecessor. This is a long, comprehensive, review intended for people who know the first game more than it is for people who haven't played either.

Gameplay (6/10)- Just like BF1942, the main appeal to most players in this game is the ability to control many types of vehicles. However, this time around, Dice Canada decided to put more emphasis on the infantry combat. Infantry combat is a ton of fun - in the maps that are designed specifically for it.

The vehicles are balanced differently. Although there are overall less vehicles than the original, the vehicles have much more differences from each other. In BF1942, a good fighter pilot could tear up everyone without a single death, which was absolutely ridiculous. The vehicle balance in BFV, however, is put together in such a way that there really is no one godly vehicle. For example, a Vietnamese Mi-8 helicopter could tear the hell out of the ground, while an American Cobra helicopter can destroy it just by hitting a trigger with its heat seeking missiles. The Cobra, however, is far from invincible when the Vietnamese use their SA-7 heat seekers to lock onto it. Those holding the SA-7, however, are very vulnerable to any other enemy gunfire.

While it's a good thing that there's no one godly vehicle, it's also done in such a way that it can be pretty annoying. A helicopter pilot has no warning if an enemy plane swoops by to take it out all at once, or if the enemy suddenly spawns with the heat seeking SA-7s. Thanks to the SA-7 and the heat seeking missiles on the American MUTT in the 1.10 patch, aircraft certainly get the short end of the stick this time around. Napalm, I might add, is an absolute gimmick.

Tanks are well balanced. While some tanks are stronger than others, there's no tank that can take everything. Tanks don't take one hit to the back, and I commend Dice for actually thinking about this.

The majority of maps are flawed, which is a huge problem when you only have 11 of them. EA advertises 14 maps, but three of the maps are simply modified versions of three of the originals. Too many of the maps are wide open with very little cover. As any Vietnam game should be, every map is loaded with foliage. Sadly, the foliage cannot be seen longer than a medium distance, so it's not very reliable cover. A huge part of Vietnam games is about ambushing, but this game simply doesn't get it down correctly, save Ho Chi Minh Trail.

One thing BF:V did nicely was to give a nice variety in the selection of the weapons. BF1942 gave you only a few, and the weapons were very similar to each other. Vietnam, however, lets you choose four different classes, with two different types of "kits" in each of those classes. The kits aren't just a gun change, they usually change several weapons and feel very different from each other. It puts a great amount of variety into the infantry part of the game.

The game also added booby traps, most of which kill infantry on contact. However, these traps are rarely used and even when they are, they're pretty useless. If there was a warning icon if you got near friendly booby traps, they'd be at least somewhat useful. But the main problem with them is either that the maps are too wide open, or the fact that players rarely take main roads. There's also the mobile spawn points, where the Americans get some strange box and the Vietnamese get a portable tunnel, as I like to call it. These points can be placed anywhere on the map and give the team that uses it a huge advantage. The Vietnamese get the better one, which makes up for their somewhat more flawed weapons.

Single player is still the same, only with improved AI. There is no campaign anymore, it's only instant battle. The bots are still idiots, but at least they have a general idea how to fire an automatic weapon. They're not bazooka snipers anymore.

CTF and TDM from BF1942 weren't very impressive, so they weren't added into Battlefield Vietnam. Instead, Dice put in a Custom Combat mode which doesn't allow you to change much. You can remove infantry kits and remove or replace vehicles around with similar ones, and that's it. It would be better if they the players us a little freedom with the mode. Helicopters in Hue would be interesting.

The last thing that needs to be mentioned about the gameplay is BF:V's updated flag system. When you go near a flag radius, a timer will show up indicating how much time is needed to capture the flag. The more players on either team, the more the time goes in their favor. Two players will capture a point twice as fast as one player. It is impossible for a person to capture the flag unless he has more buddies with him than enemies in that radius. You seem to spawn out in the open more than you did in 1942, which presents itself as a large problem.

The flag system is good, but the biggest mistake that Dice made patching this game is the flag warning icon. The second you enter an enemy's flag radius, their entire team knows about it. This means that almost anyone dead on the opposing team will spawn there and kill the player attempting to take it. This combined with the fact that the side with more players in a flag radius gets control of it faster means that it's very difficult to capture flags, and battles can go on without many changes in the possession of bases. The main problem with it is that it promotes camping and demotes being stealthy. Rather than a player attempting to capture the flag, knowing he'll just die, it's not uncommon for him to just kill whoever spawns there. As of the 1.10 patch, however, the flag warning icon is just an option, and I strongly suggest you don't go to servers with it enabled.

Sound (6/10)- Allow me to start off this section by saying that the fact that you can play songs out of your vehicles is pure genius. However, playing them anywhere besides in an aircraft is not. When the game was first released, people played songs all the time. Now, people picked up on the fact that if you play songs, you're going to get killed. The songs that you can play from vehicles happen to be the loudest sounds in the game.

The rest of the sounds are way too soft, and only sound decent when you actually can hear them. A tank can blow up twenty feet away from you, and instead of hearing "BAM!!!!" you hear a "poof." There's a lot of sound glitches, such as hearing the first split second of any song when someone plays it, regardless of where they are on the map.

Graphics (7/10)- The graphics are slightly improved over the original, and the engine now allows for foliage. The Huey models are incredible. The graphics engine just isn't optimized the way it was with 1942, though. Many people see much slower framerates than they should, even taking the better graphics into consideration. The water looks great at a distance, but up close it looks disgusting. The graphics are generally very nice to look at - the only aspects which bring this section down are the minor flaws and the performance issues.

Replayability (7/10)- If you enjoy the gameplay, you'll find yourself playing this game a lot. Considering it's intended for online play, most of the replayability comes from playing with others. The lack of well thought out maps, however, might make the lasting appeal fall short.

Final (7/10)- I thought Dice Canada proved their worth with the Secret Weapons expansion, but apparently they can't be trusted making a new game and modifying its engine. I almost feel sorry for them, because it was likely EA who bullied them into such an early release date. Still, this game is still what it is - a rushed sequel of the innovative Battlefield 1942. It has some cool new features, but it's not the sequel I hoped for. Perhaps later patches will improve on this game's problems, but I don't see any big changes coming in the near future.

Regardless, Battlefield's Vietnam core gameplay is still a lot of fun if you can overlook its long list of problems. I honestly hope the result of this game is a lesson to EA and Dice, and that EA gives Dice Sweden plenty of time to design and test Battlpt.zld 2.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/13/04, Updated 07/14/04