Gamespot doesn't know what their talkin about. This game's great!!!
As you know, Battlefield was scheduled to be released near the launch of the xbox 360, unfortunatley it was delayed. But now it is out. And personally I'm loving it.
The First thing i noticed when i first turned on battlefield 2, was that there was no offline multiplayer. This was a disapointment, but then again, most people just play with their friends online now-a-days. so i didnt fret over it too much.
What i liked though, in modern combat, is that the Single Player Missions actually had a storyline to them, instead of jut random maps, that you could do the same thing in free-play mode. You start off as an american unit, and follow objectives and such, then youll find yourself playing as the chinese, then back the the americans, and such. It has a nice timing, letting you play just enough of each faction without getting tired of it.
Another thing that is pretty cool in Modern combat is the new hot-swap feature, this way, you can control all the troops in the battlefield at any time. Let me explain how this feature works. Lets say you see a friendly soldier maybe 30 yards right in front of you, you can simply press the x button, and the camera will do some swirly dizzy transatction, and youll suddenly find yourself as the character you were just looking at a few seconds ago. This is very useful, and youll get out of many tight situations with this feature. Lets say, you were a sniper, and you saw an enemy tank pop up right in front of you, and you see an engineer off not too far. You can simply press the x button, take control of the engineer, and blow up the tank, without dieing whatsoever. Although you cannot use this in multiplayer, it is pretty cool in single player.
One thing i also noticed is the in-ability to bring guests online in a server with you. I mean i pluged in 2 controllers, press the start button on the second controller, and everything. If you can bring a guest online, im yet to see it. And i've even asked the boards (and they dont know either.)
One thing that bugged me about battlefield 2 is the fact that single player can get real hard sometimes. Youll find yourself restarting missions often, consulting the forums/faq's very very often. But finally when you beat the game, youll realize you can still continue. Battle field 2 has this cool feature where you can upgrade and get new weapons for your troops as you beat more and more missions. And as you do this, these hard missions can sometimes get quite a bit easier. But after you get every gun, and upgrade all of them, you really dont have much else to do with singleplayer. You can replay the missions AGAIN, but noone with a healthy attension span can do this effectivley.
I'm glad, in a way, that They delayed this game to get rid of a few bugs. The game runs real smoothe, with barley any glitches. But there are some repetative glitches that you will notice as you play this game. Sometimes if you get exploded or shot at alot, youll notice that one of your arms is grotesquely twisted. It doesnt look like it actually got twisted from the damage you took, its a rag doll glitch. Also lots of people complain that "the shadows look really bad" Well personally, i really didnt notice it at all. I think the shadows look fine to tell you the truth. But sometimes it isnt very hard to count the oversized pixels on a shadow of a building or something. But if your the type of person to dwell upon the shadows of a game, then you really need to get a life, seriously.
Overall i really enjoyed the online multiplayer quite a bit. I love the multiplayer conquest-esque games. Although you can only hold 24 people per server, you really wont notice it at all. The maps seem just as dense as the maps in BF2 for the PC. And im not saying the maps are smaller. They're quite big.
But back to the online multiplayer. Youll have a fun time loading up dual blackhawk helicopters full of troops, and flying them over the enemy base, and watching them all parachute down. It really seems realistic. Personally i think it's very 1337 to parachute (by yourself.) into an enemy base armed with only a knife, a silenced SMG, and some c4. (and also a flash bang grenade, but i dont use that much.) You can easily plant c4 on enemy vehicles, and wait for them to enter them, and as soon as they get in, set off the charges. Youll find yourself feeling very victorious after such feets.
Another thing i liked was the abundance of vehicles in the game. Not only can you drive your faction's army vehicles such as assault jeeps/boats. But you can drive some of the civilian vehicles as well. If you see a truck laying on the side of the road, you can load it up with your buddies, and try it with that.
But One thing that Gets people pissed off easily in this game is TKers.(team killers, people who kill their own team on purpose.) You can easily avoid these if you go out into the field and run around, where a tker would get tired chasing after you. Where most of the tking takes place in, is in the main base for each faction. If your waiting for the helicopter to spawn, youll find yourself waiting for it to spawn with a tker waiting right with you, with a gun pointed to your head. Although you can easily cast a vote to votekick the tker, it is hard for other players to see that you casted a vote. You might find yourself actually asking people in the server to boot the person you want out.
But if you actually get into a vehicle, and your server is TKer free, then you will have the time of your life. There is no greater rush than flying 15 feet above the ground dodging flag poles and buildings with inches to spare, with gunners shooting out the sides of the window the whole time. This game will give you a great adrenaline rush if you let it.
But one thing i didnt like about the vehicles is the fact that you can too easily kill one. It only takes 1 or 2 shots from the rocket to kill a tank, something a sneaking engineer can do with ease. Also the fact that the Snipers have this tool called laser targeting. In my opinion it is the cheapest weapon in the world. What it does is basically locks onto the target (after you hold down the trigger button long enough.) and about 15 seconds later, a missle will shoot out from the sky, and by guided to the target you just locked onto. You only have like a 1/10 chance of surviving this, this is if your basically doing backflips with your blackhawk, and the missle flies outta control and misses you (barley.) or if you bail out after a good amount of time when you hear the locking on noise.
You can, however use this laser target tool an unlimited amount of times without wasting any ammo, if you use the right technique. Often times, the minute people hear the "locking-on" noise in their cockpit, they bail out, carelessly. So you can simply just use the laser targeting gun on a target to bluff him into bailing out. You can do this by just holding down the trigger button untill the gun is almost completly done locking on, if you let go, the targeting will be canceled, and you wont waste any ammo. This is very useful if you want to get a pilot out of a helicopter, and as he parachutes downward, snipe him with ease.
Anyway I really liked this game, Ive racked up about a good 50 hours on it, and its safe to say im addicted to it now. I really enjoyed it, and i hope you do too.
I give it a 9.3 out of 10.