Battlefield 2: Modern Combat

"Future FPS games coming for the PS2 -- watch out"

First and foremost, I wanna say that I've got the online adaptor just recently, back in October...I have no FPS' for the computer. Now onto the review.

Presentation: 6/10
Nice menu's, cool vid's in the background. Hi-tech stuff. But no Options selection!? What!? It's a real pain going through all those loading times just to get to the options menu to set your game up. Other than that, it's fairly decent. Although the "Rewards Tutorial" and the other tutorial seems really out of place; EA should've looked at SOCOM at how they do the whole Bonus(same as rewards) thing.

Graphics: 6.5/10
It was alright. It can't hold a candle to what SOCOM or Call of Duty looks like though. The ragdoll effect was the most unnecessary feature of this game - it just makes the whole game "funny". EA or Dice just put the ragdolls to the max -- and what's up with the "T" rating? Games like this should get down and dirty as much as they can...anyway. There's only 5 character models and they all look the same, but that shouldn't affect anything because you're gonna kill 'em all. Also, the environments and explosions all look very nice - vehicle details even better. I can see EA/Dice aren't as shallow as people thought they were!

Sounds: 9/10
Sounds, good part of the game. When playing through the single player campaign it was real nice to hear a group of soldiers just shouting, guns blazing and surreal explosions. All very well done. The thing that annoyed me was when you switched over to the Chinese campaign, that Commander 31 sounded like a real bore -- plus the voice sounded too robotic.

Gameplay (Singleplayer): 7.5/10
Now, like I wrote before, I didn't have the Online pack for a long time. So Singleplayer aspects are the first thing to look at in a primarily online game. The backdrop of the story is a war between China and NATO filled with propaganda (e.g. America vs. Iraq right now....). The game itself fluctuates in difficulty; sometime's it's REALLY difficult and other times it's REALLY easy, there's no progression - it's just random. This can be a real pain especially when going through a few easy missions and then getting hard hits in a real hard one. But not to worry, backup and Hotswapping are nice little features that can help turn games around. It's not a bad idea...but people might be turned off to this arcade-styled shooter and it's "unrealism". Overall, I think the game deserves more praise for it's singleplayer campaign...with over 200 medals to get, it's pretty fun to replay the missions, especially those where you received 2 or 3 stars. As for the mini-challenges in the game, they're fun as well but they won't help you get skills for online play, it's there for fun and ONLY fun.

Gameplay (Online): 9/10
The online gameplay is nothing I've ever seen before. For the most part it's pretty fun but because of EA's mess up with the mic communication there's rarely any stratgey talks going on. So it's rare to see a team work so well to defend their flags in Conquest, usually it's gung-ho and blazin' it up through the deserts of Backstab or rushin' it through the snow in RussianBorder. With dozens of maps, very many of them are underplayed and a few are over rated. In short, online is very fun to play but with a few mistakes here and there it can be frustrating. Not much to say here, you'll have to play it yourself.

Conclusion:
Good job EA, you've done a good job transferring this PC title onto the console. Hopefully in the future, you can do a much better job in polishing the game up. The graphics and online are the only main concerns I have, other than that, I know EA can do a bangup job on the next Battlefield....jets maybe?

Rent or buy?: Definitely a buy. But if you're not into FPS', then you obviously rent it.

80% = A-

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/05/06