War is hell... sometimes...
Now, often when I write these reviews, I try very much to keep my reviews based on the facts. I’m going to deviate from that a little this time and give you a few personal views, purely because Battlefield 2 can be such a very varied experience.
Firstly, the single player missions are just a batch of single missions. There’s no campaign mode at all, which may disappoint seasoned BF1942 players. But BF2 isn’t targeted at those wanting a new offline game, this is an online game and as such, it shines. By all means use the single player mode to practise with so you can competently not fly that chopper into a hill and get to grips with the control set of your choice, but don’t rate the game on what, to me, feels like a tacked on extra to add a little value and provide a practise area where you can learn how to do stuff.
Once you’re online, BF2 varies massively between hugely satisfying and immensely frustrating. Part of this is down to the people playing, which EA can do bugger all about. The other part is down to the game itself, and as such requires some fixing. Starting with the game, the server browser is about as responsive as a concrete fencepost. Now you may think that to be an odd simile, but try wiring your mouse up to one and then you’ll see. Once you get used to it, you realise that it hasn’t crashed and moving the server list down using the scroll arrows really does mean a 15 second pause… and forget dragging the view bar down, you’ll totally confuse things.
Also, BF2 absolutely HATES being alt-tabbed. It detests it with a vengeance. So, if you’re in a late night session and you’ve got a scheduled task like MS Anti-spyware installed, your best bet is to log out of the game and wait for that to kick in and then abort it. Better still, kill all your scheduled tasks beforehand, as once you’re in game there’s no quick way out. And quitting out and reloading is a laborious process as load times are, at times, stupifyingly long.
Joining a server involves such long load times you start to wonder if the maps really are stored on your drive. My 2 Mb ADSL connection still means I’m sitting there for up to two minutes watching progress bars. The 3D objects loads, the collision detection (I kid you not) and the textures etc. Then the whole thing is verified by the server before you even get to the spawn screens. If you’re unlucky enough for a map to have finished while this is going on the spawn screen will load and then you’re dumped back to the load screen again for another scintillating three minutes of watching progress bars and percentages.
Now, this wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that during the hugely long load times, someone else has also joined the server… perhaps just before you even. Try playing in the early evening when the public servers soon fill up and after all that loading and verifying, you might find that you can’t connect to the server as it’s now full. So you drop back to the un-responsive server list to find somewhere else to play.
But sometimes BF2 will dump you back to the server for another reason. Now, I could disclose what this reason is, but I think that any reasonable game would tell you why you can’t connect, yes? Well, actually, no. Not in BF2’s case. If there’s some sort of problem preventing you from connecting, BF2 won’t tell you what it is, it’ll just give you a generic “There is a problem with your connection” message and dump you out of the game back to that lovely server list. But what makes this infuriating rather than just annoying is that it still goes through the whole loading sequence first and will even load the game up and let you see the squad screen before kicking you out. In short, you wait two minutes to get kicked… and never find out why.
Because I’m not a nasty soul and because I’d hate anyone to go through what I did trying to find out what exactly is wrong with my connection, I’ll tell you what the most likely culprit is. After checking my router, opening various ports and even mucking around with my network I discovered that PunkBuster, for some unknown reason, doesn’t always auto-update. If you’re playing with an older version of PB, you won’t be able to connect to servers running newer versions. In my experience, having a newer version than the server is fine though. So because of PunkBuster, I’ve wasted a good hour and half testing everything… silly of me to assume that the version installed with my less than two week old release would be out of date, I suppose. So if you’re having troubles, do a manual update of PB and you should be fine.
The next niggle is the SafeDisk copy protection. Having spoken to EA Tech Support on this issue, it appears that the version of SafeDisk shipping on the disk isn’t compatible with some versions of Windows and you have to go off to the SafeDisk site to install an update to fix this. It’s not a huge issue but trolling through the online support site doesn’t offer up any clues, so it’ll cost you a National Rate phone call to find out.
And lastly, the actual online experience can vary hugely, from being an immensely satisfying and challenging experience filled with desperate, adrenaline fuelled actions to utterly pointless and annoying team deathmatch-like sessions where it’s every man for himself, regardless of what side you’re on. Given the long load times for online maps, I found myself playing on a server I really wasn’t enjoying in futile hope that people would start joining my squad and we could start a coherent attack…. But there’s nothing more frustrating than watching a medic go haring off in a tank having refused to heal you or give you a lift. If EA can speed the server browser up and optimise the load times then it wouldn’t be such an annoying experience as you could hop servers quickly, but as it is as the minute be prepared for some frustration.
On the flip side, find a server with one or two decent squad leaders and you’re laughing. With the built in comms keeping things simple, there’s no excuse to not go get a headset and get involved on good servers with team players. Already some notable servers are up with organized matches and the like and everyone is very friendly, especially towards new players who might feel a little daunted by the sheer complexity of the game. The sooner players realise that co-operative teamplay is the key to winning a map, the sooner there’ll be more servers out there playing BF2 to it’s undoubtedly superb limits.
Ok, enough of a personal rant from me, let’s get to the conclusion of the review.