If you’ve ever played Battlefield 1942, you’ll get more of the same from Battlefield 2, which is not a bad thing at all.
Battlefield 2 combines elements of strategy with gorgeous first-person graphics, a realistic physics engine, and a slew of land, sea, and air vehicles, not to mention more than a few different guns to play with. The new squad mechanics allow for players to communicate and organize efficiently, and talk to each other with the ease of in-game VOIP. Even in enormous 32 on 32 player battles, voice communication is a snap, with the game only allowing you to communicate with your own squad, and the battlefield commander, if you’re the leader of a squad.
The Battlefield 2 commander mode was a pleasant addition to make the spacious maps more manageable by a unifying leader (if you’re lucky enough to find one). I had hoped that the commander mode would offer a more involved interface than it did, as it’s quite similar to the overview modes that every other player can use. The inclusion of artillery, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV – used for scouting out the locations of enemy troops) and supply drops adds another interesting strategic element to the reused Battlefield recipe.
The quick voice menu system is another interesting development in the series’ lifetime, as it allows you to tell your fellow teammates important information like troop movements with a simple button combination. Sometimes I find myself wishing for the traditional menu-style voice communication system, but like many games, there are some things that you just have to get used to.
As with any game, Battlefield 2 comes with its share of problems and grievances, though only few people actually have problems that substantially affect their gameplay. The controls are somewhat difficult to remap, should you take to a non-default control style, and the in-game server browser can be quite a drag, though indeed the patches released addressed some problems.
Battlefield 2 has a limited multiplayer scope, as there is still only one game mode, and no others have been announced for addition. Though there are not as many maps as other multiplayer games, the sheer size of the map usually greatly compensates. Each map also comes in three variations of size, 16-player, 32-player, and 64-player, which allows smaller games to play more like a large game by decreasing the size of the map available to the players. This is a notable feature, but more maps in the future will raise the overall quality of the game significantly. Already, the developers have released a remake of the Wake Island map that was popularized by Battlefield 1942, hopefully with more in planning.
There is so much to do in Battlefield 2, even though a new multiplayer mode couldn’t have hurt, and so many different ways to do it. All in all, Battlefield 2 is a great game as it stands, though it still holds the potential to be one of the best games of this generation (with improvement, of course).