The Battlefield series marked something of an evolutionary leap for online gaming. While the spiritual predecessor of the series, a much-overlooked action title by the name of Codename: Eagle is the game which actually started the whole "multiplayer vehicular warfare" thing alongside the likes of Tribes, and was an insane hit at my local LAN parties for its time, the game itself suffered from a disappointingly small community and some rather lackluster network coding. Still, this was only a small sign of things to come, as when Battlefield 1942 inevitably hit shelves amongst huge fanfare it prompted a big change in how people saw games of this nature. No longer did competitive multiplayer titles have to be restricted to small maps with on-foot action – now it was possible to make huge, sprawling maps laden with gun emplacements, drivable boats, tanks, planes, and even aircraft carriers (much to everyone’s misery, as was later revealed). Now, following the slightly disappointing release of Battlefield: Vietnam, the long-awaited official sequel to the series has come to play, sporting an entirely new engine, a revitalized approach to gameplay, and a huge smattering of new features which help make this unquestionably the best game in the series to date. But is Battlefield 2 all roses and cherries? Let’s dig into Dice’s latest project and examine both the good and the bad.

First, the bad – or rather, the really bad. After gleefully grabbing my copy and rushing back home, my grand expectations halt once I encountered the first of EA Games’ copy protection measures; the CD key. My ordinary hatred of such an implementation was amplified when the installation program told me to check the "lower left of the back of the DVD/CD case" – to which I did, and found no sign of a key ever existing there. Several frantic minutes later eventually brought me to my game manual of all places, where I finally found the sinful code (on the back, in a VERY obscure place) and was able to enter it successfully. Then, after installing, I was promptly met with a notification that I should disable my disc emulation software. Okay, most of us out there use programs like DaemonTools for a multitude of reasons, and we’re all used to disabling such software for the sake of running modern games. Except this time, DaemonTools wans’t the culprit; nay, the game instead refused to boot up until I annexed my registered copy of "CloneCD", the only disc copying software I ever bother using these days. To state that I was pissed off would be something of an understatement, and I really am becoming more and more annoyed at how much legitimate consumers are being hassled by these copy protection measures. Really guys, it wouldn’t hurt that much to tone things back just a notch now, would it?

Fortunately, once I managed to get around the copy protection by uninstalling my sole piece of CD burning software, I then hopped right into the game and was promptly forced through the usual gamut of splash screens which are always bundled with an EA Games release. The game actually forces you to sit through the opening splash screens every time you open the game in an unskippable manner, until you suddenly notice that you can simply delete the relevant files and never have to "challenge everything" ever again – though I’m sure any future patches which are inevitably released for the game will find some way to bite me in the ass for doing this. As for the game’s overall interface, it has been somewhat improved over that of BF1942 and Vietnam, although sadly still carries its own load of faults and stupid problems. Upon first booting up the game, players can either select to jump right into an offline instant-action session against bots, or go online – though of course in order to even gain access to the rest of the UI, they have to first sign in to EA’s online servers with an account, even if they want to play an offline LAN match.

My real complaints with the interface however stem from one significantly flawed piece of the puzzle: the server browser. For some reason, the development team elected to implement it with only the most bare-bones of functionality and in a half-broken state, meaning that most of the things we take for granted in today’s games are sadly unavailable. The server filtering options are finicky and don’t even apply properly half the time, the browser is slow and hangs up easily (by this, I mean you can expect constant, odd freezes here and there when refreshing the server list or vainly attempting to use the sorting options), and, worst of all, lacks any kind of "Favorites" option, forcing players to go through the same clunky searching process over and over again to get their favorite servers. For a game focused so much on improving the online gaming experience, Battlefield 2 certainly has quite a few inexcusable flaws in its interface. Right now using third-party browsers isn’t even an option because the game doesn’t support the calls these browsers need to make just yet. Great.

With my whining about the blatant UI problems out of the way, I would now like to comment on where the game actually shines. To claim that (from a gameplay standpoint) Battlefield 2 is an improvement over its predecessors would be something of an understatement – it’s obvious that the developers took a good, long hard look at the balance problems that struck the original two games and just decided to hammer away at them until they worked right. The result is a cleverly-balanced game with a gamut of features and a level of entertainment so vast (if a little elusive) that it almost offsets the problems which plague the engine it is based on. The basics are still the same; the core gameplay is based around two teams fighting each other for control of critical points around a large-scale map, taking advantage of a variety of vehicles and character classes to augment their assaults. The multitude of character classes from 1942 and Vietnam have been refined into seven major classes in BF2: Engineer, Medic, Support, Assault, Sniper, Anti-Tank, and Special Forces. The cool part is that each and every class in the game is now fully combat-capable – Engineers aren’t stuck with a neutered single-shot rifle anymore, for example (instead, they are typically armed with shotguns or light sub-machine guns), and medics can cause almost as much injury as they can heal, thanks to their rapid-fire weapons and shock paddles (which are a hilarious way to kill an enemy you’ve snuck up on, and can also be used to revive fallen team members).

Naturally this does not lessen the specialty of each given class – while an MP5-clad medic is a far more effective killing machine than his equivalent in BF1942, he’d still be no match for an enemy support-class soldier, armed with a heavy machinegun and capable of laying down a deadly hail of bullets in a given direction. Special Forces soldiers can stick remote-detonated demolition packs to just about anything (including friendly mobile vehicles – the jeep jihad lives again!) and blow them to smithereens, and assault soldiers, aside from being bad-ass in general, come equipped with an M203 grenade launcher for sending enemy infantry flying or just knocking on tanks. The development team even took the support integration one step further; if a medic (healing), engineer (repairing), or support class (ammunition) steps into a vehicle and starts driving around, he will automatically start providing support specific to his class type to anyone in a radius around him. Hence, having an engineer in a jeep or APC following a convoy of tanks around can be incredibly useful, for obvious reasons.

But the numerous class improvements pale in comparison to the huge amount of effort Dice has put forth in trying to enforce a strong tactical style of play onto the entire experience. In fact, just by playing for less than half an hour, one can immediately see how much more strategic and coordinated the game is. This is thanks due to three new major assets: VoIP (Voice-over-IP), the squad system, and the commander system, all of which can work in tandem to co-ordinate a match on a multitude of levels. At the top of the ladder of either of a given round’s two teams is the "Commander", who can hit CapsLock at any time to pull up a real-time strategic map of the area. From this map, he can see a list of all assembled squads and assess their status, as well as issue direct waypoints to specific squad leaders to "attack" or "defend" or "repair" a given location (along with a few other options), and also has four support options of his own, all of which are limited only by their recharge times. "Artillery", as one would guess, calls an artillery strike from a trio of (destroyable – keep them protected) cannons at some area of the map to the area the commander designates, annihilating the hell out of anything unfortunate enough to be caught in the radius. "UAV" will temporarily drop a small aerial drone into the area with a sizable radar range which will mark enemy targets for all friendly units to see, until it runs out of fuel. "Supply" will drop a supply crate at a designated position, which any player (regardless of if he’s vehicle-clad or on foot) can walk up to for ammo, healing, and repairs – this can even be used to fix the artillery cannons or other support equipment if it is damaged and no players are available to fix them. Finally, "Scan" just does a wide-range sweep of the entire map to show the location of all enemy troops, but only the commander can see this, and the effect is very, very brief.

When this ties into the squad system (any player can join a squad, but only the "squad leader" can issue waypoints or receive direct orders from the commander), it’s painfully obvious how much of an awesome tactical experience the game can become. Another thing that will most likely strike you after a bit of playing is that you are playing what is, for all intents and purposes, Team Fortress 2, which makes it seem as if Dice got sick and tired of waiting for Valve Software to get their act in gear and just decided to do it themselves. Not that I’m complaining – the way that members of a squad can actually spawn directly at their squad leader’s position to get right into the action (providing he’s alive, and/or in a vehicle which has empty slots) automatically encourages an inherent level of collaboration from even the most tactically-inept of players. VoIP takes this one step further in a creative manner; squad members can hold down "B" to chat with the rest of their squad at any time, while squad leaders also have the option of holding down "V" to get a direct voice-chat link with their commander – and the commander can do vice-versa to rapidly fire off orders to his teams (only the squad leaders will hear a commander’s voice chat responses). Of course, text chat is still available, but when you’re flying an F-15 at Mach 3 over enemy SAM emplacements, you don’t exactly have time to look down at the keyboard and type "I NEED ARTILLERY AT TH-FUCK". My only complaint regarding this otherwise well-implemented system is that there are no keybinds available to at least chat directly with other players who are nearby or in your vehicle (regardless of if they are in your squad), which can make things exceptionally frustrating at times.

On the subject of vehicles, BF2 certainly doesn’t come up lacking. Sure, there’s the standard array of jeeps, buggies, and tanks, (I particularly like how players can now hold down the control key to "duck" when they’re inside of a machinegun turret position, to avoid getting their head sniped off every time the driver stops to ask for directions or inevitably plows into a ditch), but there are also now numerous APC vehicles armed with heavy rapid-fire cannons and laser-guided missile launchers, as well as dedicated anti-aircraft vehicles with a devastating array of heavy-hitting triple-A barrels. But of course the most noteworthy vehicular offerings are the jet fighters and choppers available on almost all of the maps. Blackhawks, Cobras, Hinds, Migs, F-35s, and more all make an appearance in the game as flyable aircraft, and Dice has really gone out of their way to flesh out these vehicles as much as possible. For example, F-35 pilots can actually switch their aircraft to VTOL mode just by setting the throttle all the way down, allowing for some really nice precision landings and takeoffs (if tricky), which is a really cool little piece of detail. Probably the best aircraft experience however is hopping into an AH-1 Cobra with a co-pilot manning the forward chain gun and launching TV-guided missiles – an experience which would be even better if my aforementioned complaint about being unable to voice-chat directly with any person inside of your vehicle was resolved. Players concerned about control need not fret; while having a joystick setup helps enormously with flying any aircraft in the game, they are also still quite practical to pilot using the mouse and keyboard. Also, on a sad note, the winching system to air-lift vehicles introduced in Battlefield: Vietnam is now absent, something which disappointed me to no end.

When all of this combines with the capacity for some damn huge maps (the game offers 16, 32, and 64 player versions of each map, which is a cool balancing move to help adjust the gameplay experience based on how many players are available), Battlefield 2 is really blessed with the potential to become one of the most amazing online combat games in existence. So it’s on account of this that I’m really disappointed at the sheer number of faults the game still suffers from. For starters, there is only one major gameplay mode, "Conquest", which isn’t really much of a surprise (it’s all that most people played with the original game anyways, with some exceptions), but I know there are some passionate veterans out there who were really hoping to see CTF make a return. Relating to this is that it isn’t really possible to play co-op mode against bots online either (the game does feature an offline botmatch mode, but it only supports some of the game’s maps – and only their 16-player variants, to boot), and while the modding community is trying to find a way to work around this annoyance, progress is proving to be slow. Probably most annoying however are the sheer number of bugs and quirks that have snuck into the experience. For example, if you are typing out a chat message while zooming around in an aircraft or vehicle, there’s a chance you may be inadvertently ejected if you happen to hit "E" while typing (and of course have the default control configuration). The game’s typing system can also get very unresponsive unless you really hammer at each keystroke, so "Look out behind you" usually turns into "ook out beind yo" if you’re not paying attention.