"familiar style capture the flag"
Game Play
Battlefield 2 is set in modern times with modern weapons. This means big explosions, artillery strikes, heat seeking missiles, and helicopter gunships. Yippee. Don’t expect the battles to depict real life events and wars however. Battlefield 2 isn’t sold as a realistic battlefield simulator for obvious reasons. Firstly to make it a game there has to be balance between the teams. This means no matter how powerful the US is, in the game they will be balanced with the opposition. The developers have got the balance just about spot on. Each side is very similar in terms of weaponry, skills and tools. Each map has been designed so that each side has similar vehicles and aircraft. There are a few maps however where the US get huge tanks and the Middle East Coalition just get some crappy vans with machine gun turrets. Overall thought the balance is good which allows for an exciting online game."Battlefield 2 is set in modern times
with modern weapons"
with modern weapons"
There are three teams within Battlefield 2, the United States, the Chinese, or the newly formed Middle East Coalition. The maps usually involve the US against one of the other two sides. The maps are built for 16, 32 or even 64 players. The maps scale depending on the number of players so your not wandering forever on a huge map without encountering some action. Players with smaller bandwidth can often find it better to play on a server with only 16 players.
On each map the idea is to capture key areas, i.e. the flags, and to defend them from the opposition team. Unlike other capture the flag games you have to wait a minute or two near the flag before its captured. This feature is nice but can cause some frustrating gameplay. The time between dying and respawning is usually 15 seconds. This is good for gameplay as it gets you back into the game quickly, but if your capturing a flag and just killed an enemy soldier, you know they will probably respawn behind you and kill you before capturing the flag. Obviously this means your better off capturing the flag as a team rather than on your own. This is both good and bad. Good if you’re in a team that does genuinely wants to work as a team, but bad if they don’t. The flags can also be capture by helicopters hovering above.
"On each map the idea is to capture key areas"
In Battlefield 2 the two competing sides have a number of tickets, usually around 300. Your team must hold over half the flags to start the other teams tickets counting down. Each time you die your teams tickets goes down by one. The idea of the game is to get the other teams tickets down to 0 before yours. In a well balanced game that can take anything from 30 mins to 2 hours, meaning Battlefield 2 isn’t a pick up and quick 5 mins play kind of game. It’s very easy to spend over 5 hours playing at one time without realising. This emphasises how good a game Battlefield 2 really is.
When joining a game you have to pick from a variety of soldier classes including Assault, Sniper, Special Ops, Combat Engineer, Medic, Heavy Weapons, and Anti-Tank units. Each class of soldier has their own skills and weapons. Medics for example can use their defibrillator to heal dead team-mates but only until the spawn time is up. The engineer can repair vehicles, the support class gives ammo and the Anti-Tank unit has a missile launcher. You gain points for killing the enemy or by using your unit’s special skill such as healing. You loose points for dying. At the end of the game medals are awarded based on these points. If your on a ranking server you also gain experience points which count towards unlocking weapons and increasing rank from recruit all the way to General.
"a variety of soldier classes"
Each side is split into squads of a maximum of 6 players. Each squad has a squad leader whose job it is to pin point areas for supply drops and artillery strikes to the battlefield commander. The battlefield commander is one player in your team who has been voted by the other players to action the requests of the squad leaders. By default you start the games not in a squad. When playing you can choose to either spawn at a given captured flag or next to your squad leader. Spawning with your squad leader may give the extra backup your team needs to capture that vital flag.
"Spawning with your squad leader
may give the extra backup
your team needs"
may give the extra backup
your team needs"
Battlefield 2 has so many features and hidden depths the game can sound very hard and difficult to pick up. The reality is different. The game is relatively easy to pick up and play without ever reading the manual. However the game is hard and the teams online are genuinely very good. It’s easy to get killed almost instantly after spawning if a sniper is camping on the hills. The helicopters and aircraft are hard to master but its worth spending sometime on the single player maps trying to learn the controls. It’s also worth getting a joystick for. Controlling a helicopter with the mouse is awfully hard.
"helicopters and aircraft are hard to master"
As with the other Battlefield games the testing must have been extremely poor. The amount of problems and bugs with the game is unbelievable, especially for a sequel. The game has the tendency to crash out when it feels like it, which is a real pain when you’re in the middle of a great game. Also virus scanners and a like cause the game to minimise switching the scheduled program. Even virus signature downloads can cause the game to minimise. If your flying a helicopter with 5 other team-mates in, they are gonna be really annoyed when you seemingly loose control. It usually takes a couple of minutes to switch back even on a modern machine. Also the memory and CPU the game takes up is unbelievable. Even when you quit the game it takes a minute or two for your computer to recover. The load time on the levels is around 2 minute’s minimum which makes it extremely boring trying to get into the game. The intro movies and EA logo videos load every time you play the game. This makes getting into the game even longer. Only real way around this is to delete the movie files. The multiplayer browser is slow, unresponsive and is often inaccurate listing servers as only having 10 out of 16 players then on joining your told its full. Refreshing shows them as not full. The “play now” feature hunts down a ranked server for immediate play, however this often takes 3-4 mins. Not exactly “play now” is it? There is a patch released a week ago to patch to version 1.01 to fix a number of these issues, but the patch was flawed and withdrawn. Apparently it had a memory leak in it. Things like this spoil the whole game and enjoyment of what could have easily been the best game of the year, and possibly the best online game ever. Patch version 1.02 is now available but gamers are still complaining of problems with the server browser.
"multiplayer browser is slow"
Graphics
Online games contain excellent gameplay but often are limited on the graphics front. The battlefield series has always offered excellent graphics pushing the current technology to the max and Battlefield 2 is no exception. The game included the usually dynamic lighting effects and destroy-able objects. The levels are usually huge and very highly detailed. Each level consists of upper and lower levels. The upper levels usually consist of hills, bridges and buildings. Each level is excellently designed in every way."excellent graphics pushing
the current technology to the max"
the current technology to the max"
The downside of any online game is usually the lack of really big impact explosions and level destructibility. Battlefield 2 explosions are good but pretty naff when compared with Medal of Honour and alike. The dazed effect you get when near explosions or when getting shot at is superb though.
Sound
While the sound in the game is good, it’s easy to forget it while engaged against enemy online as your cencentrating hard on not being killed. Generally speaking most of these games sound very alike. Gun shots sound like gun shot and tanks sound like tanks. One thing worth mentioning is this game benefits from turning the sound right up. If that means disturbing your neighbours then a good pair of headphones with a microphone is recommended."this game benefits from
turning the sound right up"
turning the sound right up"
Battlefield 2 also fully supports voice over IP. This means you can communicate with your team members via a microphone or headset. This makes co-ordinating your attack so much easier. Its also easier to say, “he’s behind you” than to type it.
Overall
Arguably one of the best squad based online games of its genre. Battlefield 2 is action packed excitement all the way through, only let down by the bugs, load times, and unresponsive game browser. It’s a shame the unlocking of weapons is forever and not per game as it will eventually mean hardened gamers having better weapons than those that don’t play as often, which is unfair and eventually will lead to unbalanced games. If you were a fan of the original Battlefield 1942 your going love the new features.