Battlefield 2

"Solid game, solid fun!"

Nothing like the chatter of a SAW to get you going in the morning. DICE and EA have brought their next major installment in their Battlefield series to the masses, and there is much praise to be lauded. There are several issues with the vanilla (v1.0) version of the game that can cause some serious frustration, but only detract slightly from the actual game. Well, let's get down to business :

Graphics : 10

You can tell when a company puts some serious effort into making a game look sweet. All models have a great amount of detail, both in texture and in animation. Lighting effects, shadows, water. All of it is positively gorgeous on the higher settings. The game also allows for lower-end systems, and while not as pretty, still capture the feel and look great. There are some fantastic little touches as well. For example, having a tank fire near you or something explode in your immediate vicinity blurs your vision and muffles sound, giving you a great ‘dazed' experience a la Call of Duty. Solar-flare effects, glistening water, scattering birds, splashes, and particle effects all pull you in to the experience. There's no blood, but it's not a feature that detracts from the game at all.

Rag-doll physics add to the ‘fun', as does debris that flies when stuff blows up…DICE did a bang-up job all around.

Sounds : 10

Another high score for another job well done. DICE nailed the sound effects on this one! Bullets whistle in the air near you and make satisfying meaty ‘thok!' when they hit an opponent (or you). All the vehicles have great engine and gun effects, and all the weapons throughout sound dead-on. Even the medic's defibrillator sounds realistic. A great addition is the VOIP addition that allows immediate communication between players (more on that later).

Music is only played during the end of a round when you see the scores, but it really is unnecessary elsewhere in the game.

Gameplay : 7

There's good news and there's bad news. I'll give you the good news first.

Battlefield 2 has a really neat ‘Advancement' system that basically tracks your stats for you on all ranked servers. As you kill foes, heal and repair comrades, and capture/defend critical points on the map, you earn ‘experience' in the loosest sense of the word. As you accomplish the above mentioned tasks, you earn rank, starting at private and moving up from there. As you advance, you get priority over those you outrank for Commander duty (more on that in a second), and you get to unlock new weapons for the different soldier kits (Medic, engineer, assault, etc). In addition, you earn medals for accomplishing landmark numbers of kills or time playing, which don't serve any particular purpose, but sure look pretty!

Another great gameplay aspect is the new Commander/Squad system. Players can take on the role of the force Commander, and can select certain squads to perform certain tasks such as attack, defend, repair, etc. The squad leaders can choose to accept the objectives at the touch of a button, and a waypoint with a symbol indicating what needs to be done will appear on the HUD of everyone in the squad. The squad commander can also scan the battlefield causing enemy blips to appear on the radar of everyone on the force for a brief moment, or call in an unmanned aircraft scan of a smaller area which exposes enemy positions to the entire force for a longer period of time. In addition, the commander can call down supply drops that heal, repair, and rearm AND can also call in artillery strikes. All of these abilities can be disabled (with the exception of squad command and the real-time overhead camera, which can get closer to the action than any other overhead view) by SpecOps soldiers who are slick enough to C4 the artillery or other key locations.

The squad leaders, aside from being mobile spawn points, can also command their individual units by setting waypoints, or can make requests from the commander using a ‘command rose'. The ‘rose' can be used for numerous things by every soldier, from spotting enemies that cause them to appear on all mini-radars to all friendly players, to requesting supplies or medical attention. This rose is brought up by hitting a designated key, and the mouse is used to quickly select the required command.

Squads can chat with other squad members using the built-in VOIP feature, and the squad leaders can communicate directly with the commander and other leaders using the same feature. Pretty spiffy.

All in all, it really is an ingenious set up. The depth of the game is impressive, and when strategy is applied to overall tactics, things get hot and fierce very fast.

Now, all this wonderful stuff above is not without some drawbacks. Most of them are little nagging issues that could be fixed fairly simply, in theory, but time will tell.

First off, the game can be rough for snipers. There is some debate as to weather or not bullets drop with distance, and this might have something to do with the cones of fire in the game. While some guns are realistic, others have a cone of fire that spreads too wildly to hit anything at all with any sort of consistency. In addition, shoulder-mounted rocket launchers have a dubious wire-guiding system that can hit ground vehicles with some accuracy, but can't hit helicopters unless they're hovering in place or you get extremely lucky. While it doesn't exactly ruin the experience, it certainly sucks points from the score.

Helicopters themselves seem to be a bit of a balance issue. A good pilot can easily dominate the entire battlefield, especially if there are no planes, since the AA vehicles provided on some maps seem more effective against infantry than anything in the air.

The squad system is ingenious, but players rarely seem to use it, for whatever reason. This isn't really the fault of DICE or EA, so no points off, but it's still something to be aware of.

The experience system is neat, but it is already succumbing to people exploiting various soldier abilities to up their scores instead of playing the game the way it should be played. This caused EA to cease its recording of stats from private servers, although it really did nothing to solve the problem.

The experience system seems to be the cause of a myriad of other issues as well. 64 player servers have a tendency to lag horribly, even though they are reporting pings as low as 20, resulting in slide-shows and furious gamers. Initially, there was also a 48-72 hour lag for stats to update, which was wholly unacceptable to most players.

Also, the in-game multiplayer game browser is atrocious. You cannot select favorite servers, filters do not always work properly, servers do not report anything besides the map with any sort of reliability, servers that one person can find often do not appear to another for no reason, there is serious freezing that occurs when attempting to scroll down the server list…all of this makes getting into a game a serious headache at times.

The VOIP only seems to work sometimes, and apparently you need two separate sound devices to work your microphone. So, if you have a plug in your volume control on your speakers, as I do, you need to find someplace else to plug it in. Poorly thought out in my opinion.

Finally, the single-player is severely lacking. You have to go in and edit code if you want to change the number of bots on the map, and you can't change the map size at all. The AI is smart, but still does some silly things, like bum-rushing a fortified position, or not taking cover in obvious situations. But then again, this game is meant to be played multiplayer.

Overall : 8

All being said, the game is solid and a great time. It looses some points for not polishing some pretty obvious problems early on, but the game is fast, fun, and has a certain depth that many shooters lack. DICE put much effort into this product, and it shows. Definitely a good addition to any FPS library.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 06/30/05