Battlefield 2 (PC DVD)

It would be easy to categorise BF 2 as a first-person shooter. It isn't - it's a mix of FPS and strategy game where teamwork is required to capture and hold key objectives on the battlefield. Whilst there's a single-player education, this game is meant to be played online, ideally with 64 players, and the game has a huge following already.

The scale of the game is impressive - some of the battlefields go on for miles and miles across beautifully-textured terrain, with fantastic detail. Clearly a huge effort has gone into the maps for this game, and it shows - there are miles of mountains, forests and towns that you'll soon know like the back of your hand. Sneak across the rooftops to that hidden sniping position. Lay mines on the only road through that valley. Stake out the key bridge with your tank.

The reason I say this isn't an FPS is purely because the bias is very firmly towards vehicle-based combat. Whilst you CAN dash around on foot blasting at everything that moves, don't be surprised when your blasting has little effect on anything other than to make that tank notice you and blast you to smithereens. There's little point in the FPS bit, other than to find a vehicle, despite a number of standard weapons classes that all seem to be equally useless.

The vehicle bias is a little disturbing if you're used to standard FPS games - even the anti-tank gun has trouble taking out anything but the lightest of vehicles. Once you've made it into a tank and discovered the grim satisfaction of chargrilling legions of infantry, it takes an age of tense blasting to take out another vehicle - what made me most skeptical were the helicopters that could withstand a mountain of tank, rocket and AA fire without falling out of the air.

Air power is key - once you're in the difficult-to-control helicopters or attack planes, there's very little that'll get you out of there, and you can cheerfully drop bombs for the rest of the round without much comeback, unless you decide to drop your joystick and try controlling the thing with your keyboard.

If you're on the ground, you won't have much comeback to the planes or 'copters and you should prepare yourself for repeated sudden deaths from the sky, as bombs, machine guns or artillery shells rain down on you. The anti-aircraft weaponry is pretty useless, and you'll get used to your "guided" rockets somehow failing to home in effectively on that sitting-duck 'copter.

Sudden deaths aren't just confined to the air either - watch your enemy monopolise your spawn points, sitting a tank or two to blow you up as soon as you respawn. A couple of minutes of sudden deaths at spawn is enough to make you start grumbling at the game, not to mention the sudden deaths at the hands of the enemy commander, elected at the start of the game & able to call in massive artillery barrages on your position.

The multiplayer game has a very firm US perspective - the various scenarios see one side tasked as the US Marines invading various nations' territory, no doubt to hunt for those damn elusive weapons of mass distruction.

Characteristically, when the good ol' US Marines successfully rob China of its territory, we're blasted with a triumphant version of the "Star Spangled Banner", whilst when (god forbid) the Chinese kick out the invading warhawks, a slightly melancholic piece of anonymous eastern music plays quietly - says it all, really.

Unless you're fluent in Chinese or Arabic, you're at a slight disadvantage when playing the other nations, since the voice commands are delivered in the language of your nation - I never really got a handle on what was being said, and the chat window is quickly overwhelmed by commands, making it difficult to hold any kind of meaningful conversation with your team/squad. Between rounds, there's a grim readout of results, and no opportunity to taunt the opposite team into playing better - you might as well be playing some bots.

Frankly, for me the game was great fun at times, but tested my patience in a number of ways - the menu system at the start of the game is S-L-O-W and buggy as hell. Those who have fond memories of nipping in to Quake 3 for a quick blast will feel that we've gone back years as they wait long minutes for the logon process, multiplayer list and server connection to start up. Yawn.

The constant deaths and complete ineffectiveness of anti-vehicle weaponry pushed me close to frustration at some points, and there were arbitary "funnies" with the character of the game that made me wince.

Seeing a plane/tank/soldier within the range of a mounted gun, but not actually being able to turn the gun far enough to shoot them. Watching the alarmingly slow and casual weapon switching/reloading animations whilst under heavy fire. Bumping a tank into a garden shed and watching the tank take more damage than the shed. Being completely unable to hit anything in the air, even with guided missiles....

Even with the funnies, it's a great game, but you can't help feeling that a lot more could be done with it. The clumsy menus, vehicle-biased gameplay and ineffective weapons make the whole thing feel a little rushed and unfinished. Maybe it'll be patched, maybe not. Until then I'm finding it on a knife-edge between addictive and frustrating. Depending on the nature of the game, it can be either one of the two.


perhaps the most important game of 2005   June 24, 2005
Stephen Bray (huddersfield, uk)
41 out of 46 found this review helpful

I need a medic! Tank on the flank, get AT over there fast! We need suppressing fire there and there, the Americans are pushing! Look out, air strike! Get in the building, I hear a sniper! MEDIC!!

DICE and EA are back with the third battlefield instalment, after the awesome but flawed battlefield 1942 and the frankly not very awesome battlefield Vietnam. And this game blows not only its predecessors, but every other multiplayer first person shooter's socks off!

To sum up the game in a long string of words, this is a multiplayer squad based first person shooter war game. Imagine counter strike, but make it military themed, make it for 64 players, add lots of vehicles and classes, add a rich level of deep - yet accessible - tactical requirement and put the emphasis on the team over the individual and you have battlefield 2.

The most common game mode is conquest (if you've ever played capture the flag or domination, you know the score). There are numerous flags dotted around the map, all are neutral except for the flag each team starts with. They have to be captured. You capture flags by just sort of standing around by them. This means it's impossible for someone to do a hit-and-run flag grab, if it's defended you need to kill the defenders to take it. The game is based around tickets, each team starts with so many tickets, and each respawn after someone dies costs a ticket. You win the game by reducing your opponents tickets to 0 by killing them, or by capturing all the flags on the map. When you die you respawn at a flag (any your team owns) and if your enemy controls the majority of the flags, your ticket count slowly drains. This makes flags of particular tactical importance.

Each team is split down into classes, and each has their own strengths and weaknesses. There's the sniper who snipes, the medic who heals injured friends and even revives recently dead friends (which doesn't cost a ticket!), the engineer who mends vehicles and support class who can re-supply ammo to friends and lay down cover fire using their enormous machine guns. There are several others. All the classes work well together, have their own weapons and have decent secondary abilities.

One of the cool new features in BF2 is squads (which work symbiotically with another new feature, the commander, more on that later). Each team is split down into squads, which are essentially teams within teams. Each squad can be assigned special objectives by the commander and their squad leaders. Orders like attack here, defend this, etc. obviously there's a human element here so you and your fellow teammates may not want to follow orders, but a team working as an organised unit will completely decimate a team of lone wolves, especially in the bigger games. Especially if you have a good commander. The commander sees the world in a Real-Time-Strategy way, top-down with a full view of the whole map. This means he's in a perfect position to issue orders as he can see who is attacking and where, and what best needs to be done. He also gets cool abilities like dropping re-supply crates and air strikes. Another advantage of squads is that, provided your team holds at least one flag, you can choose to respawn on top of your squad leader - assuming he's alive - even spawning right into the vehicle he might be in.

Vehicles play a large part in the game, both tactically and sheer fun-wise. They range from tanks to jeeps to jets, and all are awesomely fun to drive! They make extremely short work of infantry so good use of vehicles plays a large part in your overall victory, but they aren't overpowered - the Anti-tank class makes short work of vehicles with their rockets, and the special forces class has C4 which can take out vehicles if you can get close enough. It's all well balanced.

It's hard to put into words just how incredibly fun this game is. At its worst it's frustrating, as you can die repeatedly and constantly. But at its best, it's pure gaming bliss. You're running between buildings, bullets whizzing past your head, you see a distant sniper being knifed in the back as he lines your head up in his sights. A tank rolls over a hill only to be blown up by a passing helicopter, you turn to be face to face with an engineer's shotgun. Your twitch skills payoff as you gun him down before he fires. A friendly transport full of troops skids up to your position, dust flying. A flock of birds takes to flight across from you, giving away the position of a prone enemy. You lob a grenade and jump onto the truck. From nowhere, an enemy jet appears. Rockets fly. Even as your grenade turns the prone soldier to liquid, your jeep is blown up, killing you all. Then you respawn and do it all again.

Visually the game is a triumph, it looks about as good as half life 2 at its best, which makes it pretty nice looking! There are only 12 maps, but they each come in a 16, 32 and 64 player version and are all gorgeous and varied. They range from a war torn town to an oriental swamp to a middle-eastern beach. For those of you who don't - or can't - play online, the game has awesome bots. They're the best bots I've ever played with and there's tons of radio chatter to keep the atmosphere high. They're pretty easy and I found myself playing on expert within a day, but they're good and fun.

All in all, BF2 is an essential game which you can play for years without getting bored of it. It looks great, is awesome fun to play and will last you a long, long time. Highly recommended to all self respecting gamers. Esstential. Medic!


EA Games Challenge Everything...   July 11, 2005
20 out of 44 found this review helpful

So they say. Well, they certainly challenge my patience!!!

There was a time not so long ago when EA (Electronic Arts) were renowned for their excellence. What has happened???

Firstly can I say, this had the potential to be an extremely good game. Excellent graphics, superb sound, and well thought-out game play. So, why only 2 stars?

I'll tell you why... Firstly, even with the latest patch loaded, this game is full of bugs. In order to play it, I have found that I have had to do a full system restart almost every time I have played it, because of lousy programing on EA's part. When I have been browsing the internet, or maybe playing another game previously, I do not want the hassle of shutting down my ISP and then my PC and rebooting, then reconnecting to my ISP JUST to play this game!!! I just don't want to do that.

Secondly, I don't want to sit around twiddling my thumbs for a minute or so every time I click my mouse in this game's menu system. That is way too long to be waiting.

Thirdly, I've seen it all before. It's called JOINT OPERATIONS and it is by those total STARS who released those classic series of internet games called DETLA FORCE (amongst others). It sells at around 5 on Amazon if you check out the NEW sellers, and it does everything this game does, but much much better AND faster, AND without bugs AND without serious load-up delays!!!

So, as far as I am concerned, this poor effort is damn lucky to get 2 stars.

Check out JOINT OPERATIONS. You can play with up to 120 players on that game (twice as many as in BF2). Graphics are every bit as good. Gameplay is EXCELLENT. Slightly less weaponry. But for 5 - COME ONE!!!!


Excellent potential but currently flawed   July 13, 2005
B. Smyth (Crawley)
17 out of 23 found this review helpful

This game has been one that has been eagerly awaited by most gamers. The idea and gameplay is excellent, however there are so many bugs within the game that you can't take advantage of this. These bugs include freezing in the multiplayer lobby, some graphical glitches in the game and lag in both multiplayer and single player mode. This was all fixed though in the recently released v1.01 patch - which was a godsend for those who experienced the above problems. But, that wasn't the end of it. This patch was quickly withdrawn by EA due to it causing a memory leak when the game was run. The advice given by EA was to reinstall the game without using the patch; so back to square one. At the time of writing, a fix is currently being produced, but until a reliable fix is available for the game I won't be playing it.
All in all a potentially fabulous game, but with bugs that should have been fixed during development. My advice is to wait until a patch is released, otherwise, like me, you will be disappointed.

(My comments are based on the use of the game using the following PC spec:
Intel P4 3.4GHz using XP Pro
2GB of 533MHz RAM
256MB ATI Radeon X800XT using PCI Express
Creative Audigy 2 Sound card
512MB/sec DSL Connection)


BLOODY BRILLIANT   June 25, 2005
16 out of 18 found this review helpful

This is the most fun I have ever had playing a game. The graphics are stunning, the gameplay is amazing, at any time a bullet or rocket could whiz passed u and a tank or helecopter could ambush ur squad. The beauty of Battlefield 2 is the fact that, like its predecessors, it has a totally unpredictable nature to it. It's completely unscripted and chaotic, but in an awesome way. There are simply so many insane, over-the-top moments that can happen in a single game that you quickly lose track. I am an extreme game player and this one is easilly one of the best games I have ever played. Order Now!