Review: Battlefield 2

PC Gaming has been getting a lot of flak lately. As the consoles edge ever more into what has traditionally been PC space developers will have to take steps to re-imagine what makes PC Gaming special. Battlefield 2 is a title that hard-core enthusiasts can point to if they want a great example of what separates console gaming from PC gaming. Pitched, high tension battles fought street to street and house-to-house are experiences that consoles just can't offer up yet. Read on for my impressions of Battlefield 1942's sibling.

• Title: Battlefield 2
• Developer: Digital Illusions
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• System: PC (only)
• Reviewer: Zonk
• Score: 8

Battlefield 1942 has been one of the most popular First Person Shooters on the market since it was released three years ago. The solid graphics and wide open gameplay field of that title ensured that it was regularly in the mix with Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament on lists of most played online titles. Combining the vehicular combat of Tribes and the team play of Halo, wrapped up inside a WWII packaging that had yet to lose its luster, Digital Illusions scored a sales coup. Their latest title, Battlefield 2, takes place in the near future. Instead of a historical setting, modern weaponry and level design is the order of the day. Helicopters, Jet Fighters, and sidearms familiar to anyone who has watched CNN make the battlefield an exciting place to be. CNN coverage, in fact, was likely an inspiration for the developers during the game's creation. The game pits American forces against vaguely terrorist middle-eastern stereotypes, in a topical tie-in to today's headlines.

So how do you improve on an already great title? The sequel to Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield Vietnam stays very close to the source material. So close, in fact, that it's hard to point to any fundamental change in the gameplay mechanics. The changes, instead, are quality of life improvements. The game's engine allows for lagless infantry combat and accurate vehicular strikes. A fantastic audio environment places you directly in the action, raising the heart rate as bullets whiz by your head. Graphical improvements allow for a beautiful setting to slay your enemies, and tight level design makes for surprisingly tense house-to-house fighting. Stripping away options in favor of enjoyment, BF2 only ships with the Conquest game type, which pits armies of varying size against each other in a bid to control a set of nodes scattered across a map. Though there aren't that many maps each of them scales from 16 to 64 players. This allows for each map to evoke a different feel, from squad on squad to army vs. army, depending on the battle's size.

The additions they've made to the Battlefield series instead changes the framework of the tried and true gameplay they're offering up. Players have several different kits they can outfit themselves with, as in the original titles, but new kits such as the special forces soldier add in some variety. Support characters, like medics and engineers, can also increase their effectiveness by entering vehicles. These vehicles become mobile support bases, with medics inside vehicles healing fellow players that stand near the unit. Players can form themselves into small squads, each of which has a dedicated voice chat channel. Squad leaders can issue orders via a push-button system or voice, and have their group act in unison. The squads on a particular side are in turn directed by a commander. The commander of a side has a very different perspective on the game, a top down map interface giving him a birds-eye view of the proceedings. The commander has several tools at his disposal, including a kind of enemy detecting radar and the ability to call down artillery strikes. When the entire system is working in unison, players acting in concert within their squads and in league with other units directed by a commander, the experience is something akin to poetry in motion.

Unfortunately, that frission of so many different players working together rarely happens. While gamers have adopted voice chat for everything from Massive games to UT Tourneys, they generally do so with people they already know. In playing online, very few individuals seemed willing to make their voices heard to strangers. The in-game text commands are easy to access and informative, but they're still no match up for a quickly uttered statement. While cohesion within squads does seem to be generally good, as there are only a few people to coordinate, the level of effectiveness is entirely dictated by the squad leader. One suicidal or absent-minded guy at the reins can meant that you and your comrades are in for one messy death after another. In the overall picture, the commander's role ends up less utilized than it could be. Armchair generals abound in the FPS world, but in practice few are anything approaching a virtual Colin Powell. The experiences I've had lead me to believe that overwhelming force will almost always win the day. Beyond the game itself, the frustration involved in getting into combat is often off-putting. It may seem like picking nits, but the glacial slowness and murky obscurity of the server browser is extremely frustrating to have to deal with when compared to the user interfaces offered by other games.

Battlefield 2, then, is an extremely competent first person shooter with a strong pedigree and a vision to improve the way in which the genre is played. It is hampered by the vagaries of online play with strangers, poor user interface decisions. On top of these issues, bugs have been a problem since the game was released. Numerous patches, some even more devastating than the bugs they were meant to fix, have not endeared the game to players. Despite all these problems, when a group of players clicks in a Battlefield 2 game it is unlike any other team-based FPS on the market. Fans of the previous games will be happy to get back into the game they love, no questions asked. Veteran FPS players should definitely consider picking up a copy, as it's highly likely that you're going to run across this title at your next LAN party ... but you'll probably want to save it for LAN parties. Players new to the PC FPS experience will find things to enjoy here, but may be intimidated by the amount of knowledge the game assumes on the part of the player. Overall, while not a disappointment, Battlefield 2 falls short of a dramatic reprisal of the Battlefield series.

Comments

One of my Favorite Changes..

[th1ckasabr1ck]

One of my favorite things that they changed from BF1942 is that after being killed you no longer get a view of where the fatal bullet came from.

It's much more satifying to play as a sniper now that the game doesn't give away your hiding spot everytime you successfully take someone down.

Also the spawn times of the vehicles should scale based on how many players are on the map. On maps with fewer players there are far too many vehicles to go around.

Needs patching.. badly.

[delus10n0]

I've been playing since the game came out, and have the following hardware:

P4 3Ghz with HT
1 Gigabyte of RAM
ATI X800 SE PCIE
160gig Western Digital 8meg SATA Drive
Soundblaster Audigy 2 (in 4 channel mode)

The game runs like a dog in anything higher than 1024x786 resolution on that hardware. You have to leave all the settings at "medium", otherwise stuttering will occur (I've heard this is because higher settings require 256+ megs of video RAM, which I don't have.)

The game easily consumes my gig of RAM, and starts forcing Windows to swap to disk. It gets so bad, that after exiting the game, I have to wait approximately a minute before I can use the PC again (from it swapping all the memory out of the disk.) This PC just has Windows XP installed on it, nothing else running in memory.

The game will also randomly "crash" while loading a level. I'll complete a map online, and it will appear to start loading the next map, a black screen will appear, and then my desktop. Yay!

There are also issues with the "aiming"-- I think it's a case of the server/client prediction being different. I can unload an entire clip of an MP5 at short range (5-10 feet), with crosshairs on someone, and somehow 90% of my bullets miss, and the guy goes into "prone" mode and stabs me up close. Huh? There's also this funky "jump and go prone" manuever, as well as the "jump from a building and fire accurately while falling" manuever. Things that shouldn't be happening, essentially.

It's still an enjoyable game, it just has flaws and needs patching..

My Impressions

[jgoemat]

Good:

1. Fierce firefights - great gameplay
2. Good maps
3. Well balanced classes - Medics and Engineers are of more use than before, anti-tank is actually useful now that it takes less than 3 hits to kill a tank
4. Online play works well and is fun
5. Graphics and sound are much improved over BF1942
6. Quick commands is a great idea. Now you can point at an enemy and quickly mark them as spotted to your teamates, as well as call for a pickup, repair, healing, or ammo.
7. New commander and squad abilities are neat, if you can figure them out

Bad:

1. The manual just plain SUCKS. There's not really anything in it to show you how to use the new Squad and Commander capabilities, and I couldn't find them on the web.
2. No multiplayer coop - playing against a few friends at a lan party with bots for backup was one of my favorite things to do in BF 1942.
3. Finding a server and getting on with my friends isn't as easy as it could be, why not connect with friends and be able to find servers that will let you join as a group?
4. Creating an online account involved starting BF2 three times and exiting three times when clicking to view the agreements and privacy policies. Each took about 15 minutes to read.
5. You need a new video card, not because you couldn't play without but because the designers just decided to use the new shader model. If you don't have an acceptable video card, the game just quits to the desktop with no information. There's a hack out there to enable play with older cards and they play fine but might not look quite as good, why didn't they include the capability at least in the game?
6. Loading maps takes too long - there's a 'Client data validation' that takes over a minute on one of my computers (3gz P4) every time I connect to a map.
7. You need the CD/DVD in the drive to play. I know this is standard, but I fail to see the reason when you have each install attached to a KEY too that I'm sure is checked when you play multiplayer. I like playing on my work computer and my home computer, why do I have to lug the DVD around? There's a NOCD hack already or I wouldn't have bought the game.

Re:numerous patches??

[sgant]

Well, not really even 2 patches as within days of the first patch EA "recalled" it and suggested people just reinstall the game and NOT patch it.

But that's neither here or there. I'm done with this game. It's just too tiring to play anymore.

1. The voting system sucks...I've NEVER seen one vote ever go through. Ever. I'm sure there's someone out there that's seen a vote pass...but not me.

2. The punish system just plain sucks. You kill someone by accident..like in a tank and you can't see behind you and you're not totally paying attention to the mini-map to see anyone near you and WHAM you run over your team mate cause they decided to just jump out in front of you. Do they forgive? Not a chance. Always get punished. Very rare do you not get punished. This just needs to totally go away.

3. People never act like a team anymore. In the first few days of the retail release there were people that seemed to really want to win the game...but now it's just point whores that only care about how many points they can rack up...doesn't matter if their side wins or loses. The retard level is very high at the moment.

4. Now we get into the people that rage the game. Like the myg0t morons and their ilk. The ones that go out of their way to run out in front of a jeep or tank so they CAN punish people on purpose. They'll jump on top of a chopper so they die when they take off, they'll run to a place that's about to be shelled so they can punish the commander. This is happening more and more.

5. Random disconnects for no reason.

I'm done. Guess it was a 50 dollar lesson in waiting a few months after release of a new game. EA should be ashamed of themselves releasing this bug-ridden crap. I may just go back and play the demo as that wasn't as bad.