Battlefield 2 Demo: Review

Sunday, June 12th, 2005

Friday was a busy day for the GameSpot servers. So much so, that I had to resort to downloading the Battlefield 2 demo via bittorrent. EA partnered with GameSpot to make an event of the release of the Battlefield 2 demo. Most hype I’ve seen for a single map demo - but it seems to have worked out quite nicely for both. GameSpot used the opportunity to promote their upcoming service GameCenter. Smart move!

Anyway, down to the goods. I’ve been into the Battlefield series since the first installment, Battlefield 1942. Aside from the original Half-Life, BF 1942 was probably the game I’ve spent most hours playing. I was totally hooked on it. BF Vietnam, not as much. To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to BF 2 in the least. BF Vietnam never ran all that great on my system and was pretty buggy. I figured BF 2 would be a write-off. But so far, so good! The demo runs great! Mind you, I have all my settings on medium and low with the resolution at 1024×768, but it looks surprisingly good and plays perfect.

If you’ve played the past BF games, BF 2 will definitely be more of the same - which is a good thing! They don’t seem to have wrecked anything, but have improved on just about everything. The flying engine has been modified a bit to take into consideration the high speeds of the planes - which BF Vietnam did not. Flying was my favourite part in BF 1942 and as a matter of fact, I haven’t been able to enjoy many other flying games since as they haven’t done it nearly as well as BF 1942. It’s nice to see that BF 2 restored the fun to flying. The American plans featured in the demo have hover capability, which is super cool for taking off from the carrier. No need for a runway!

The demo comes with one map, with different variations for single and multiplayer modes. The SP variant is only 16 players and features 2 land vehicles for each faction. The MP variant is 32 player + and features a ton of awesome vehicles. Planes, helicopters, tanks, humvees, APCs, boats, and even a souped-up sand rail which is wicked fun to tear across the beach in.

The soldier classes are much more diverse this time around. They’ve added a new feature to vehicles which takes into account what type of player is inside it and adds new capabilities accordingly. For instance, if a medic is inside a humvee, the humvee becomes a mobile med station. The support kit can turn a helicopter into an ammo dump. Very cool!

An interesting new feature that they’re really pushing is voice over IP support for in-game chat. I haven’t tried it out yet, as I don’t have a decent mic - but I noticed that almost every server in the browser had VOIP enabled.

I’m having a ton of fun with the demo and am now super stoked for the full game, which hits stores on June 21.