Battlefield 2

So here is my review, it's 6 months late, but hey.

I blink in the bright sunlight as I step out onto the flight deck of the US Naval carrier i'm serving on. All around me is chaos as troops run to board helicopters, their blades spinning up and creating a terrible drone. I follow their example and jump aboard a Blackhawk transport just as it leaves the deck. The pilot dips the nose to build up speed as we fly low across the water towards our destination- a small, Chinese-controlled island.

As we approach, the missile lock-on warning sounds and the pilot jinks left, right, left again to break the missile lock, but it won't go, so he releases flares, leaving us vunerable for a few seconds until they reload. Beside me, the twin chain guns erupt into life as we fly over the enemy territory, scattering troops on the ground, and ripping apart those caught in the open. We hover over an enemy base, guns blazing, until the lock-on warning sounds again, and the pilot pulls the helicopter into forward motion.

I glance to the side, and see an enemy attack copter; harder to shake than ground AA, and indeed, the sound of bullets pinging off the thin shell of the aircraft cements this fact. Despite the pilot's best efforts, we're being destroyed. Warning alarms sound as flames burst into the cabin. I take my cue, and jump out, waiting a second before pulling my parachute ripcord and floating down to the ground. I land smack in the middle of a road, with enemy troops bearing down on me from a hill to the side, bullets thudding into the soil around my feet. I run and dive behind a burned-out plane. In my ear piece I hear the commander's warning- "artillery, your area". I run for a group of buildings I can see in the distance, as behind me the screams of enemy soldiers are drowned out by the deafening roar of artillery shells bombarding the narrow spit of land.

^A couple of minutes in the life of a BF2 soldier.

Battlefield 2, the sequel to FPSes Battlefield 1942 and Vietnam is set in the near future and sees the aggression between the Middle East, China and the US reach breaking point as they descend into open war.

The US is the invading force, so most of the maps are either the People's Liberation Army of China or the Middle Eastern Coalition trying to hold off the United States Marine Corps from getting a foothold in their territories.
In BF2 you play online in games of 16, 32 or 64 players. The game uses a clever but simple system of flags and tickets to decide which team wins a round. Each of the two teams has a number of flags, and you can only spawn at a friendly flag unless you're in a squad (more on that later.) Each team has a limited number of tickets; one is used each time a player dies and has to re-spawn. However, if one team holds more flags than the other, the weaker team will steadily lose tickets regardless. Flags are captured by standing next to them until they return to your control, and this process is speeded up with additional teammates helping with the flag capture. Whichever team runs out of tickets first loses.

When you spawn you can choose from a range of troop classes to attack or defend in many different ways, from standard Assault grunts with a standard rifle and body-armour, Snipers, Special Operations who specialize in stealth and covert operations, Anti-tank with a rocket launcher, Engineer, and the supporting classes of Medic and Support.

My personal favorites are Spec Ops, they have a good rifle, and can lay remote C4 charges to destroy enemy structures like their radar or artillery, tanks, or lay traps. Versatile! Although the the chances of getting 2 charges on the back of a tank and retreating to a safe distance before being reversed into or shot to bits are fairly low. Maybe 3 or 4 times out of 10 you'll be successful. It's very satisfying when it works though.

I like snipers too, it's fun to snipe people, although it's pretty hard to be accurate, and you're very vulnerable if they figure out where the fire is coming from, although you can sometimes get them post-death with your craftily-placed anti-personnel mines .

Engineer is a fun class as well, you can repair vehicles and structures, and lay anti-tank mines, although not too much as team-retards, sorry team-mates have a habit of running over them and then punishing you for the TK.
Adding into the mix are a plethora of vehicles, from buggies and jeeps, to APCs and tanks, and helicopters and fighter jets. Tanks can be good, but they tend to die quickly, as they're a big target. The Anti-Tank bitches pop out from behind some building and hit you, then duck back round while they reload, before you know it, you're blown up...
I've been having the most fun with the small attack choppers. The pilot has 3 sets of 14 unguided rockets, and then a gunner can hop in and use a machine gun and tv-guided missiles. It's quite hard to fly and aim them, but you can get a lot of kills.
I find jets too fast to fly properly and hit anything, but you do get guys on them who are insanely good and get the top score every time.
The Blackhawk transport helis can also be good- but you need a decent squad who will spawn on the squad leader, and that consists of a couple of medics to auto-heal flesh wounds, and preferably 2, but at least 1 engineer to repair the heli in flight. It's pretty hard to acheive this level of cohesion, but is supremely satisfying when you manage to pull it off. My best scores have been in this situation.

You can make or join a squad to play with, with a squad leader who is in contact with the commander, and issues orders to his squad. The squad-leader acts as a mobile spawn point for his squad, allowing him to be reinforced in enemy territory. You can speak to your squad through VoIP, although I haven't been able to test this function yet. When you're in a good squad, it can really add another dimension to the gameplay, with a genuine sense of cameraderie, and of course you are more likely to survive as you have more firepower and hopefully a medic to heal/revive you.

Medics are an essential part of a properly functioning army, they can drop healing packs, or revive a dead teammate with shock paddles (magical shock paddles that heal bullet wounds of course). When this happens, your team doesn't lose a ticket for respawing them. The Support class isn't so essential, as to be honest, you will often die before running out of ammo. They have a spray-happy machine gun for covering fire though, and on the occasions when you need ammo, you will be glad of it.
Also available is the commander position, where you have access to a map of the battlefield; which you can scan to see enemy positions for a few seconds, use a UAV to see realtime enemy positions, but only in a small area, drop supply crates, and bombard the enemy with artillery. You also issue orders to squads, to attack, hold a position, repair etc. You can get quite a lot of points as the commander, and it's a nice diversion when you're tired of being blown up for a bit.

That's probably the most annoying thing about BF2, you die. A lot. Whether from an artillery strike, or sniper, or heli or jet, or just foot soldiers- you die quite often and without warning, it can get quite infuriating. I don't know if it's because i'm rubbish or what, but my health seems to be tiny whereas enemy troops will survive heavy fire from me. Some people online are very good at this game. Another annoying factor is the fact that the other type of people online are just idiots, plain and simple. Teammates running into mines they saw you lay, C4ing the vehicle you were about to get in, rendering it comically vunerable to bullets detonating the packs, getting into a heli with some retard who crashes it in a few seconds, killing like 3, 4, 5 people, etc...

A bit less drastic, but still irritating is people who you get to join your squad and don't follow orders and piss around by themselves. This can usually be alleviated by joining a clan server, as a higher class of player frequent them. The flipside to this however is that these same servers are often full of super-nerds who are insanely good at the game and kill you before you even get a shot off at them; after a while of this I often find myself forced back to the EA servers for some easier kills (but stupider teammates). *Sigh* I guess I just need to get better at the game. But these are really the exceptions to the norm, most people are pretty good and reasonable, I guess I just had to get the worst cases off my chest.

Adding to the replay value is a system of points and awards. Every time you get a kill, kill damage assist, flag capture, flag defend, repair, heal, revive etc; you get a point or two. These add over the hours, and your rank increases, allowing you better weapons to unlock, and also to give you the commander position when more than 1 person applies (the highest rank gets it). The points system is a brilliant addition; you get rewarded well for skill, and even if you're losing badly, you'll still accrue a few points to edge you closer to that next rank and unlock.
There are a huge amount of awards that can be earned- from your basic awards for each class and vehicle, through special awards for teamwork, combat, weapon profiency and skill.

Unfortunately, i've been playing on a rather low-end machine in minimum settings, so I can't really comment on the graphics firsthand, but if you have a decent pc they are pretty spectacular. You can see some good examples here:

Pics!

The audio is very good; in battle there is no music, only a soundtrack of war! Rifle fire, explosions, shouts, screams etc all sound very realistic and are also directional- if you are looking towards a sound it will be louder, thus allowing you to judge where it came from. There are nice background effects; seagulls on the beach and at sea, rustling palms, gently creaking cranes, and wind effects when you're very high up.

Battlefield 2 is exhilarating, fun, addictive, amazing. It can also be fairly frustrating, but give it a break for a couple of hours, and you'll be raring to go, to punish that little sniper/pilot/tank whore etc who pissed you off last time, and you may find yourself still there 8 hours later! Highly recommended.

Edit 723: Here are my scores courtesy of BF2S.com

http://bf2s.com/player/48949941/

9/10