OO-RAH!

Battlefield 1942 was an amazing achievement that drastically changed the way the world thought about First-Person shooters. By featuring action both on the ground, in the air, and on the sea in massive online multiplayer arenas, DICE made players truly feel like they were participating in a gigantic combined arms battle. Battlefield Vietnam refined the gameplay and provided an interesting side story to the franchise, but fell short of a full-blown sequel that many fans had been waiting for. Well, wait not longer, because Battlefield 2 delivers that sequel and provides a lot of great refinements to the Battlefield formula.

Battlefield 2 takes place in the near future and depicts a conflict between the US Marines and either the People's Liberation Army of China, or a hypothetical Middle Eastern Coalition. Since the game is set in the near futures, none of the maps necessarily depict real world locales or historical confrontations, which undoubtedly lent the designers a greater degree of freedom. Like the previous games, each side has the same set of classes such as Spec Ops, Engineer, Assault, or Medic. Each class has unique weapons, and while each side's class has different weapons they are all roughly equivalent for balance purposes. Additionally, each side has access to various vehicles, from tanks to fighter jets to helicopters to assault boats.  Some new wrinkles to this formula are that Medics can now resuscitate critically wounded comrades, and the Support class can now re-supply other players with ammo.

The biggest change, though, is that the game tracks a player's in-game performance and awards ranks, ribbons, and medals to players based on their scores. As players rise in rank, they can unlock weapons for various classes that provide unique abilities. The website  BF2S.com provides a pretty thorough guide to this rank structure. While this addition may seem to be of small importance, it adds a huge incentive to continue playing the game to raise your character's rank and earn more powerful weapons through unlocks. This structure is not perfect; it can change drastically from patch to patch, and the unlocked weapons often do not provide a great benefit over the original weapon for that class. Nevertheless, this persistent character aspect of Battlefield 2 represents a big improvement over the original.

The previous Battlefield games were meant to be played online. While they had single player modes, these were hampered by a weak AI. Battlefield 2 improves the AI considerably for the single player modes, but goes a step further by including scalable maps. Basically, any map in the game has several size settings. The more players, the larger the map. To keep things interesting, all maps are on their smallest settings for single players. This has the advantage of limiting the load on the computer for AI, but it also means that many vehicles (especially jets) are unavailable in single-player modes. This is a compromise, but most players will not really encounter issues with it, since they will be playing the game primarily online. Without a doubt, the single player mode is a sideshow at best, and gets old fast. This is a problem for players with dial-up, since unlike its predecessors Battlefield 2 requires a broadband connection for online play.

Gameplay in Battlefield 2 is largely unchanged, in that controls are still centered around the classic mouse and keyboard "WASD" setup.  Personalizing these controls for both infantry and vehicles is still relatively easy, which means that Battlefield 2's controls are responsive and serve the game well. The sound in the game is very good, featuring remixes of the original game's theme while maps load and a great variety of sound effects during game play. Unfortunately, the "radio" feature from Battlefield Vietnam that allowed players to play songs from vehicles in game is gone. Perhaps the biggest advance for Battlefield 2 is in the graphics. Compared to Battlefield 2, the maps are larger, vehicles and characters consist of many more polygons, and textures are much sharper and detailed. Unfortunately, this also means that Battlefield 2 carries a much steeper minimum hardware requirement, and even above-average hardware won't avert above-average loading times for maps. However, the richness of the game's visuals easily off-sets the inconvenience of long loading times.

Overall, Battlefield 2 is a significant advancement over its processors and an extremely fun and addictive gaming experience. It is not without its faults, such as steep hardware requirements an long loading times ( I personally wish that Battlefield 2 had more of a naval component like Battlefield 1942). Additionally, the fact that there is only 3 armies in Battlefield 2 versus 5 in Battlefield 1942 tends to limit variety a bit. Overall though, these are fairly minor quibbles and any FPS fan would do well to pick this game up.  So far I have logged over 60 hours into the game, and I have yet to get tired of it.

By Andy Rucker