Battlefield 2: Modern Combat
October 31,2005 -

The Battlefield series has always been regarded as one of the best multiplayer games on the PC. The frantic, yet strategic, wartime action and insane amount of drivable vehicles keeps players coming back for more time and time again. The developers, DICE, faced a tough challenge to keep the aura of Battlefield intact when they decided to port the game to consoles. Battlefield 2: Modern Combat includes everything you would expect from the Battlefield franchise and even a brand new single player campaign.

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See the frantic action of BF2: Modern Combat

Battlefield has always been a strictly multiplayer game, so the addition of a single player campaign mode came as a surprise to many. This new single player experience puts you in the middle of an ongoing battle in Kazakhstan, located right between Russia and China. With plenty of oil reserves, it is easy to see why there is a battle for control of this area of the world. However, the campaign does not really follow a cohesive storyline. The game is poorly strung together by “protect the base” type missions and the story seems like an afterthought to the action.

While the story may not be up to snuff, the developers have balanced the single player action to feel similar to multiplayer Battlefield. You are put in control of a small army in the field and you can control each soldier individually. While this may sound like a large task the job is made easier by the all new “hot-swapping” feature. You can hot swap to any soldier that you have a direct line of sight to, even if they are barely within view. This feature makes it extremely easy to switch to any player in your regime at any time, and with the constant barrage of enemy attackers hot-swapping becomes a godsend.

While the hot-swapping feature helps keep the game feeling like Battlefield, the game still ends up playing like a straight run and gun type FPS a majority of the time. This style of play gets really old very quickly and truly throws a wrench in the whole Battlefield gearbox. Luckily some mini games, called “challenges”, have been thrown in to mix things up. Challenges are unlocked after beating a level and they range from simple crazy taxi rip-offs to tougher hot-swapping challenges. While the challenges are quite fun and fairly varied they really don’t add much to the game.

While other games in this genre, like Halo and Far Cry, tend to have solid single player games, as well as great multi-player games, Battlefield really only succeeds as a multiplayer game -- are you surprised? We didn’t think you would be.

Battlefield turns into a whole new beast when you connect to the internet. The fast paced action, huge maps, and awesome vehicles will have you logging online daily to keep your kill count rising. Twenty-four players can battle at once on one of thirteen maps for ultimate online supremacy. The maps are utterly huge to say the least. Even the smallest map will have you trudging on foot for what seems like forever. Lucky for you, there are plenty of vehicles for you to exploit, about 30 to be exact. Everything from Black Hawk Helicopters and Bradley Tanks to beat-up pickup trucks and dune buggies can be loaded up and taken for a spin. All of the vehicles handle well and even the more complex chopper controls will be mastered in a short time.

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