Battlefield 2 reviewed

WHILE MOST of the world waits anxiously for the release of surefire summer blockbuster game hit, Battlefield 2, it is already on store shelves in parts of Asia. The INQUIRER has a copy, and presents the first review of the game based on play on public servers.

First, for people who don't know what on earth I'm talking about, a quick introduction to the games in the Battlefield series. It's simple really: two heavily-armed teams, a variety of vehicles, a handful of flags scattered across the expansive landscape. Players capture a flag by remaining close to it for a while (in BF2, the more players within range, the faster they capture it). If your team holds a flag, you can choose to respawn (come back to life) there after you are killed. Generally speaking, if you hold more flags for longer than the other team, then your team should win the match.

You can choose from several differently-equipped classes, such as assault infantry, medic, engineer, etc. Any player can drive any of the vehicles, which include planes, boats, tanks and so on. If you want to try it out, download the free demo version of BF2 (or one of the earlier games in the series). The game is distributed by Electronic Arts (EA), and developed by Digital Illusions CE (DICE).

Battlefield 2 adds two significant new elements to the game play mix, both intended to promote team play: the team commander, and squads. Squads are like mini-teams within a team. Each squad has a leader - squad members can respawn next to the leader if he's alive. The team commander gets a top down view of the battlefield, can issue commands to squad leaders, and has some special powers, like artillery attacks, supply drops and a spy drone which reveals enemy units.

I can't really say much about the game's features that hasn't already been said better in multiple 'previews' and 'first looks' all over the Internet. See the links at the end of this article. However, the difference with this review is that I've actually played the full game online, on overloaded public servers full of unruly members of the public, and not on a private, high-bandwidth server filled with my colleagues and polite EA staff. So I'll concentrate on that experience in this review.

A thing of horror

First of all, if you've played the demo, and there's something that irks you about it, then I regret to inform you that the retail game currently has the same problem - there appears to be no difference between them (apart, obviously from all the extra maps, etc, in the full game).

Top of the irk list is the in-game multiplayer server browser, which lets you find servers running BF2 games and connect to them. To be brutally honest, this is a thing of horror which will repeatedly frustrate your efforts to connect to game servers. It's so bad that I wish I could turn it off. It's probably best to write down the IP addresses of a few favourite servers and type them in manually.

Rumour has it that the first patch to the game will let you connect to servers from an external server browser, such as the All Seeing Eye, therefore bypassing the in-game server browser - this isn't possible at the moment. I noticed also that the game configuration files have an option to turn on an 'Advanced Server Browser', but this currently has no effect.

Oddly, GameSpy.com's otherwise excellent review of BF2 doesn't mention the problems with the in-game server browser. Most likely this is because the issue wasn't obvious at the time GameSpy wrote the review (because of the very small number of servers online then). Sad to report, however, some malicious types say the fact that the woefully-inadequate server browser sports a 'Powered By GameSpy' logo might be connected with its surprising omission from GameSpy's glowing review. Fortunately, the INQUIRER is a serious publication and has no truck with such mean-spirited tittle tattle.

Public 64 player servers

I've been playing the game on EA's official 64 player servers in Taiwan. These have been packed with players for the past few days. Unfortunately, it seems that 64 players is a few too many for these particular servers (or perhaps for the typical player's Internet connection), and play has often been quite laggy, particularly in crowded areas of the map. I only saw the servers empty when they crashed (which appeared to happen a couple of times a day), and were restarted. Then, as players gradually reconnected, the game played far more smoothly while there were 40 or fewer players.

Despite this, playing the game has been a lot of fun, and DICE have done a great job of improving a popular formula without unbalancing game play. The new team play elements work very well. Squads really encourage players to work together - teamwork was something that was often lacking in the earlier games in the series. In BF2, it is surprisingly easy to quickly form an effective squad with a group of strangers on a public server.

If you're leading this kind of ad hoc squad, however, you need to keep them busy, and preferably on the attack. If you accept orders from your team commander to defend a quiet area, you'll find most of your squad members quickly disappear to join more exciting squads. The squad leader is also the squad's respawn point, so you need to figure out how to lead your troops into battle without getting killed (medics can revive you sometimes, but it's difficult in the heat of battle). The game's built-in VOIP (voice over IP) can help here, since you can quickly tell people where to go, instead of having to always lead from the front.

The game currently has an issue with team kills. Not the normal one, of players cheerfully mowing down their teammates for the joy of it. DICE has fixed that, by imposing a -8 point penalty for team kills, and having repeat offenders swiftly kicked from the server. The main problem with this is that moving vehicles kill players too easily. Touch a fellow player with a vehicle, and he dies, no matter how slowly you're moving. So the public servers are already witness to the spectacle of groups of players standing in front of planes as they take off in order to get the pilot kicked.

Compared to earlier games in the series

The single player game was by far the weakest part of earlier Battlefield games. It has definitely been improved. Your teammates may not be tactical geniuses, but they no longer crawl around aimlessly in the middle of nowhere. Instead, they, and your enemies, use vehicles to move to flags en masse. Teammates also respond to your commands better, and always let you into the driver's seat of a vehicle. Still, the single player battles usually don't have the urgency of more scripted games like the Call of Duty series. They also limit you to 16 player maps. It's best to see BF2's single player mode as a kind of giant sandbox where you can play around with the fighting machines and weapons of your choice, and face targets that fire back.

There are a couple of play modes from previous Battlefield titles which are missing in action in BF2. The first is Coop mode, where a server is inhabited by a combination of computer controlled soldiers and human players - this omission is a particular shame considering the improvements in AI. The other MIA is Capture the Flag (CTF) mode, which lent itself very well to Battlefield's no-holds-barred arcade action and breathed new life into old maps, by forcing radically different tactics from the game's normal conquest mode.

But is it worth buying?

Much of what BF2 does has been done before, by earlier games in the Battlefield series, and their predecessor, Codename Eagle, and by a couple of other games, notably the Tribes series, and Unreal Tournament 2004.

What BF2 offers is the popular Battlefield formula with better teamplay than earlier games in the series, and updated with spectacular graphics (if your PC can cope) and sound.

Despite a few problems, Battlefield 2 is a truly excellent game. The online play is great fun, and the offline single player mode isn't bad. If you like online first person shooters you'll almost certainly like this one. And if you're a fan of Battlefield 1942, it's simple: buy this game.

Will the bugs be fixed? A patch is already in the works, apparently. DICE/EA were fairly responsive to user complaints with the original Battlefield 1942, but the more recent Battlefield Vietnam wasn't such a happy story.

Footnote: why has nobody else reviewed this game?

If you've been following the hype surrounding the release of Battlefield 2, you'll know that although staff at many gaming publications have been playing pre-release copies of Battlefield 2 for a few weeks now, nobody has written a review of it (with the exception of EA's special pal, IGN/GameSpy). That's because they've signed NDAs (Non-disclosure Agreements), which forbid them from publishing a review before the official launch date. That's standard procedure in the games reviewing business: if they won't sign, they don't get the pre-release copies.

Actually, a few sites have bent the rules and published so-called 'previews' which are effectively short reviews in all but name. But still, they aren't allowed to call them reviews, or give the game one of those scores out of ten which somehow magically sum up all the game's features in a single number. On that note, by the way, I hereby award Battlefield 2 a score of 174,328 INQmarks(TM).

Funnily enough, I did try to get a pre-release copy and an NDA to sign (in my capacity as a freelance writer, not as a representative of the Inquirer), but despite noble efforts from some EA representatives, it didn't work out. If I'd succeeded, I wouldn't have been allowed to write this world exclusive* review of Battlefield 2 today.

*Er... world exclusive apart from IGN/Gamespy, who were given special permission to publish a review three days ago.

Links

GameSpy's review of the game
IGN's review
GameSpot's preview
1up's preview
GameSpy looks at the game's maps
Can your PC cope with BF2?