The game also enforces some strong anti-griefing policies through several different systems, but this too has horribly backfired. When a player is teamkilled, he has the option to "punish" the offending player, therefore grossly reducing his point total and possibly getting him banned from the server. The problem is that idiot players seem to be attracted to the anti-vehicle mines friendly Engineers will place around a base for defensive purposes (in spite of the big red skull that appears over them when a friendly player gets close), and it’s very common for me to weep openly after I witness numerous well-meaning Engineers getting kicked from a server because friendly players couldn’t be arsed to drive around the mines, and just chose to get exploded and reflexively punish the "team killer" instead. Another flawed system to prevent cheating that Dice has chosen to implement is the infamous "Punkbuster", which seems great on the surface, but has actually been technically proven by this point to cause stability and speed problems with the game itself, as well as induce any number of other side effects that numerous gamers are suffering from. I appreciate the pro-active effort to cut down on exploitation and griefing, but it’s painfully obvious that this process badly needs refining.

The game engine is also a mixed bag. Granted, for a game that expects servers to handle up to 64 players (a certain percentage of those who may be tooling around in vehicles at any one time, each with its own complicated and detailed physics model) in a playable manner, Battlefield 2 manages things surprisingly well, but we’re still at the stage of the game’s release where most of the active servers are notoriously unreliable, and seem to either crash or start lagging out at the drop of a hat. Dropping the player limit down to 32 seems to fix a lot of the major problems, but they still clearly exist, and when latency hits this game, it hits hard. As for actual rendering power, my ever-reliable XP2500+ / Radeon 9600 Pro / 1GB RAM system wanted to just curl up and cry endlessly after attempting to process this game. Well, actually, it’s generally not that bad – but setting the texture detail to "high" is an instant recipe for misery to anybody who doesn’t have less than 3GB of RAM, and if I actually set most of the other detail options to anything higher than "low", I ended up with horrifically jumpy framerates any time I entered a detailed urban area. The game also got a kick out of hardlocking my system at random, but thankfully "VPU Recover" was generally able to keep me in the action. What I can say with certainty is that this game is one very demanding beast (which isn’t exactly a bad thing, given the level of graphical detail and huge maps – the industry needs to move forward at some point), but the inability for the game to comfortably accommodate older systems is something that may prove too much of a hurdle for some gamers to overcome. Oh yeah, and did I mention that the game allegedly refuses to run on any Geforce 4-series cards, yet has no issues in dealing with a similarly-rated Radeon 8500? Curious programming tactics indeed.

Battlefield 2 is a game that can offer tremendous amounts of online fun, but the effort required to actually get there is almost a turn-off in itself at times. The problems with the user-interface alone are completely unacceptable, but the game itself is also still so prone to griefing and general chaos (if in a more creative manner – like watching team members purposely run in front of your aircraft while you take off so they can punish you for "team killing" them and eventually get you kicked) that I quickly found myself not even bothering to play unless I could assemble a personal crew of my own and shepherd them onto a private server – after which I would then spend several hours having the best online gaming experience of my life. With some proper TLC from EA Games and Dice, this game could really take off and become legendary (I’m gathering it might be reaching that point already), but until that happens and some of these serious issues are fixed, casual gamers on the fence may find themselves wanting to wait – much as I hate to play the "wait until it’s patched" card again. Oh, and on a final note, if and when you do pick up this game: make sure you have a microphone, or you’ll be missing out on a major segment of this game’s potential for fun.