Battlefield 2 Planes, Tanks and Automobiles!
Planes, Tanks and Automobiles!
Before you ask, yes I thought of that catchy title myself.
Battlefield 2 comes to you on the back of the hugely popular and successful Battlefield 1942, a WW2 based first person action/shooter game. BF1942 original concepts and its non linear style of gameplay made it stand from the rest of the WW2 games that were out at that time and it created quite huge a fanbase. The best way to describe the Battlefield series is that it takes the best parts of FPS, adds in elements of RPG adds in good dose of strategy and combines it with large rolling maps and vehicle warfare.
So what makes the Battlefield franchise so appealing? Well in every Battlefield game there is a selection of character bases to choose from each one tailored to meet any players particular tastes. In this regard Battlefield 2 is no exception for example, if you prefer to go behind enemy lines and blow things up you can play as a Special forces character, or if you prefer to work with vehicles you can choose to work as an engineer. And if your wimp and don’t want to get shot at you can choose to be a medic. However BF2 USP is its vehicle warfare, and is by far the strongest feature in the game. By having vehicles it means strategic options in the game become a lot more bountiful due to the varity of different vehicles and the different roles they play. Vehicles range from dune buggies, to tanks and transport helicopters to state of the art fighter jets, all of which are playable but no without there problems which I will discuss latter.
Now the objective of the game is quite simple, you play either one of three ‘factions’ (USA, China or the Middle eastern group) and your pitted against another faction. The ultimate objective is conquest and this is achieved by reducing the number of tickets your opponent has (think Company Of Heroes) to zero which is achieved by holding more control points then he does. The other to win is by capturing all the control points and wiping about your enemy so he can no longer respawn. This brings me onto my first criticism of the game, in the past when I play FPS I normally get an option to select which type of game I would like to play such as deathmatch, domination, capture the flag etc this is were I feel the developers have let the game down a bit. Would it have taken a lot of effect to implement different gameplay modes into BF2? Having just the one standard of gameplay limits the games longevity in my opinion. The biggest fundamental change is the addition of a Commander and Squad command level. If you join a squad, you gain the ability to respawn where the leader is, as well as receive waypoints and other commands from the leader. It's absolutely a boon in continuing assaults against a position, and an implicit encouragement for team play, especially with the built-in voice communication in a squad. While also existing on the map, the Commander's real role is to abstractly co-ordinate the battle on the strategy map, ordering scans, deploying the UAV to reveal enemy in a particular area and then choosing targets for the howitzers to pound the crap out of them. Now remember what I said about playing a spec-ops character? You have the ability to take our each of these resources (which can be later repaired, re-activating them), adds another consideration to the conflict.
Given the sort of resources EA has its no surprise to find the sound has been authentically reproduced to a high standard, so if you have invested into a decent sound card and speakers (like myself X-Fi) you are really going to in for a surprise as you hear the rumble of tank rolling up a hill ready to blast a enemy stronghold into the oblivion. In the intervening time gap between BF1942 and BF2 technology has moved on a rapid pace and so has the graphics and physics engine generates BF2’s maps and physics. The sensation of skidding a buggy down a side road while trying to get the hell out of there before a tank manages to turn its turret on you is absolutely impeccable. Speaking generally, the vehicle additions like expanded-used helicopters and fighter jets add to the tactical possibilities of the conflict but more on this latter. A brief note on performance, your going to need to a mean rig to play this with all the bells and whistles turned on, the maps are huge and put a strain on the graphics card.
After playing this game online and single player for quite a while I will give a bit of advice to budding BF2 players. Please learn how to effectively use planes and helicopters properly on single player before you venture online. There’s nothing more annoying then joining a game and watching some n00b get in plane taking off thinking he’s Tom Cruise from Top Gun only to see him crash his plane into a mountain four seconds latter. Alternatively someone is piloting a helicopter full of spec-ops on a mission behind enemy lines only to have the pilot crash half way there killing everyone on board!
On the face of it BF2 seems really exciting, and the prospect of being able to switch between a tank to a fighter jet may bring back memories of Midwinter and Midwinter for some of the older gamers out there. However it’s quite as clean cut as that trying to master the art of dog fighting is one thing but I fail to see how the air combat can actually benefit your team overall success. The implementation of air combat seems almost like a token feature rather then anything useful. Helicopters on the other hand do actually seem to serve a useful function on the battlefield, transport helicopters means you can travel to anywhere on battlefield relatively quickly, they can be used to send in reinforcements, quick extractions and commando missions.
Overall I found the game to be very frustrating, the game has an unprecedented 64 player multiplayer maps, something that has never been achieved by any game before or since, however if like me you prefer to fighter single player you are limited to only 16 players and much smaller maps. If you want to change this you have to download either a crack or the dedicated server, which really grips me. I’m a big fan of Unreal Tournament 2004 and in that game you have the option to setup single player skirmishes against varying bot difficulty (even the bots are individually programmable), and have as many as want and you can select to have teams balance or un balanced. Coming from that to the ridgedness of BF2 was quite a shock and frankly it put me of the game. I also don’t like the number of maps that are available in the default game; there are only a measly 12 for multiplayer games and only 10 for singleplayer. Another criticism I have is that the game was launched well before the game was ready, how do I know this? Simple because when I went back to the game the other day I thought I might as well, I was shocked to find the patch was over 400MB in size. This for me is highly unacceptable, even for those with broadband it’s still a hefty download. The bots in game are a little bit better then in previous instalments but they pale badly next to other games such as HF2/Counter Strike and UT2K4, perhaps one of the reasons not to have fewer maps for singleplayer is because the bots are hopeless at flying planes and driving boats? If so this is a damming incitement of the ability of the programmers to script half decent bot A.I.
My issue with the game aren’t just limited to the to the gameplay. Now I know nothing about programming but surely programming a interface has got to be easier then programming the rest of the game. The interface, specifically the server browser and keymapper, are not designed badly so much as they perform terribly. The browser in particular is extremely ponderous and slow to respond. It's hard to believe an interface can lag, but it feels like the player's computer is connecting to itself through a 14.4Kbps modem. The server list is particularly egregious, where even merely scrolling through it can be an exercise in frustration. Opening the front menu during combat by hitting the escape button is not unlike committing suicide outright. The loading time and quit time for the menu could be measured on a sundial. This seems to afflict new commanders and squadmates especially, who are trying to quit the command/squad menu (Caps Lock) by pressing the escape button. Of course, the escape button is also easy to hit when the player is trying to switch between positions on a vehicle, which is done by the function keys (F1 being the default position, of course).
To sum up Battlefield 2 is like having a plate of chalk and cheese. Some aspects of the game are really well done such as the land based vehicle combat and the class system. I would have liked to have seen some more differentiation between factions because all 3 are basically the same strength just with different models for vehicles. The graphics and sound are top rate and those with high end systems will enjoy the eye candy and authentic sounds of the various pieces of equipment makes when fired. Despite this I just find myself banging my head into my monitor I can live with poor interface, why didn’t Dice add more gameplay modes, more maps to improve the games replayability? They could learn so much from games such as Unreal Tournament, if they did EA would have a big winner on their hands.
System: Core 2 E6400, 1Gig DDR800, Creative X-Fi Extreme Music sound card, X1900XT 512MB, Gigabyte P965 DS3 motherboard, Seagate 320gig SATAII hard drive.
Score: 79%
(above: Is this the way to Amarillo?)
Originally Posted by Phalanx_15
I can assure you I'm probably one the biggest PC gaming fanboys on the site.
