Battlefield 2

The Good
Following in the grand tradition of Battlefield 1942, released four years ago, Battlefield 2 has you capturing and holding strategic locations, in an all-out-war against between various enemy nations; each equipped with an arsenal of real-world vehicles and weapons.

The wonderful thing about the Battlefield series has always been the great diversity in the roles for your soldiers. Battlefield 2 takes this even further, including a total of seven infantry classes: Assault, Special Ops, Medic, Engineer, Support, Anti-Tank and Sniper. Confuse the enemy with your smoke grenades, flash bangs and grenade launcher as Assault. Destroy enemy assets with remote activated C4 as the deadly Special Ops class. Be the Medic, and heal soldiers of their wounds. Don't forget that as medic, you can also use your defibrillator to revive recently fallen allies or shock enemy soldiers. Repair vehicles and lay anti-vehicle mines with the Engineer. Lay down suppression fire and resupply your friends with ammunition as the Support class. As the Anti-Tank class, wield a potent rocket launcher capable of destroying enemy armor. Last, but not least, reach out and touch the enemy as the Sniper, and secure in your position thanks to your Claymore mines. If the variety of soldier-types available wasn't enough, the game hosts a large selection of vehicles. Tanks, jeeps/personnel carriers, fighter jets, transport helicopters, helicopter gunships, landing craft, aircraft carriers, and so forth...

New to Battlefield 2 are on-line player statistics. With every battle, the player earns points which can lead to promotion in rank. New ranks allow players to unlock new weapons for the various classes. Soldiers can also earn various medals and badges for displayed excellence in various fields. Some are earned as simply as killing XX number of enemy players in a round with a given class, and others require months of play to achieve.

Another new addition is the squad and command system. At the beginning of each round, players can apply for the position of "Commander", higher rank having priority. Commanders scan for enemy units via satellite/UAV, temporarily displaying their position on the map for allies to see. Commanders can also drop vehicles and supplies, and lay down devastating artillery fire. However, commanders can be killed or have their satellite up-link temporarily destroyed. Having a good Commander in the field creates a feeling of camaraderie, and helps to focus the team's efforts as a whole. Working under the Commander are Squad Leaders, who are charged with relaying orders from the Commander to the various squads under the Squad Leader's command. This Commander/Squad combination works very well, especially when used with the included VOIP communication support. To top it off, BF2 servers can support up to 64 players at once (32 per team), so you can have a respectable number of squads in play per side.

The in-game graphics are quite excellent, and render mechanical, human and environmental locations with amazing detail. While it's not quite the detail found in games like Half Life 2 or Doom 3, it's impressive enough. Sound is equally satisfactory, with realistic sounding gunfire, and explosions, and like the original 1942, there are some incredibly catchy menu/loading tunes. Marvelous voice-work rounds out the audio department, with each faction speaking in their native language. (At least, so far as I can tell.) The VOIP audio is sometimes less than clear, but this may be a combination of poor microphone quality and connection issues.

The Bad
The game carries over many things from the previous BF1942, and this unfortunately includes the hefty system requirements. Even so long after release, the engine (game version 1.41), displays obvious need of fine tuning. Even on high-end machines, BF2 features lengthy load times, and this is followed by noticeable periods of disk access as virtual memory is cleared on exit. (Once I doubled my RAM from 1GB to 2GB, this later issue was solved.) Game client verification is done upon entering on-line servers, to check your game for hacks or other modifications. This can often take as long as the game takes to load the map, sometimes longer. Be assured that once the game has loaded, you're in for a treat, however these issues do add to the frustration level. All told, the process took about half a minute or more on my machine, which was noticeably above the recommended system requirements.

Bugs and design flaws in BF2 are noticeable, and quite annoying. Occasionally you will be disconnected once a map is loaded and you're about to begin play. Some players have reported earning hard-won medals, only to have servers which claim to report statistics, not send the data to the computer holding your character stats.

Hit detection is inconsistent, often odd. In one situation you might kill a man with 1 pistol hit to the head from 100 feet, and another might have you lying dead next to him, wondering why 5 point-blank shotgun blasts to his same head wasn't not enough. There were times where it required an entire clip to hit a stationary enemy, while I was prone on the ground, standing near him, and carefully controlling my burst fire. (This after nearly four months of constant play.) Even more strange, characters can dive to the ground, adjust their aim, and shoot perfectly within less than a second; hardly realistic by any standards. By no means is the combat entirely broken, but the hit detection/damage system errors are more pronounced than most first person shooters, causing even veteran players to pull their hair out, from time to time.

More so than the original 1942 game, Battlefield 2 features a limited single player mode, which is basically a single player version of the multiplayer setting, only with predictable AI soldiers. Sorry, no campaign mode. While this is somewhat disappointing, the main purpose of the game is multiplay, and it is there in which the game shines.

The pistol selection is rather basic, each nation having a statistically identical 15-shot 9mm pistol. (Some with silencers.) No .45 caliber USPs, Magnums or Desert Eagles here.

The Bottom Line
Playing Battlefield 2, it's not hard to feel like you're part of a real-world military action, everyone in the battle working together like a well-oiled machine, each doing their part. Rent the game or try it out at a friend's place. If you can get past the occasional bug, slow load times, and put up with the sometimes frustrating damage/hit detection, you're in for a real treat. There's so much to do, what with the various classes, different factions, and selection of vehicles, that it's sure to last you a long time.