Awesome game but with some serious launch issues.
User Rating: 9.3 | Battlefield 2 PC
I have been waiting for BF2 to come out for a very long time, so when it finally arrived i got it immediately. The demo was awesome, with great internet play and just plain fun, even with only one map. I must have played the demo alone for over 10 hours. But the retail version was not good. It had some major issues, some small (like having the auto-join game when it's done loading not work), and some very big (like not being able to join servers on the internet). After many frusturating hours of trying to get this game to perform the way it should i finally succeeded, and it's a blast. GAMEPLAY: 8 The in-game gameplay is perfect. You could not improve on it in any way. The teams are balanced, the maps are balanced, the controls are awesome, and the communication to your team and squad members is revolutionary (the comma rose is one of the most useful and simple to use communication things ever). I mean, how cool is it that you can tell your squad to attack a base, then request artillery from your battlefield commander to bombard the enemy base with artillery and then sweep in with your squad and capture the control point all without typing a single word? The out of game gameplay, however, just sucks. The "play now" button is bugged (you have to wait 5 minutes just for it to say "no servers available" and you can't cancel it), so you have to manually find servers you want to play on. Then there's the matter of joining games that say that they have 13/32 people but when you want to join the "server is full". About half the servers have a ping of 0 for some reason. And those are non-ranked servers. Don't get me started on the ranked servers. After 10 minutes of loading, all you get is either being booted back to the server-selecting screen with a "network data corruption error". After hours of searching for good servers, i finally found a ranked server called the Internode Gaming Network QLD that works perfectly. Good loading times (about 5 minutes), great people and best of all, YOU CAN PLAY THE GAME! That's right, no errors, just log on and have fun. It's the best. There is some lag at the very beginning of EVERY game you will play after just loading the map, so be prepared (it usually takes 15 to 30 seconds to go away completely). GRAPHICS: 10 Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. The textures look real, flocks of birds take off when you get too close to them, trees sway in the breeze...the tanks look real...the guns look real...of course, if you have a fairly old video card, forget about playing this game, because it has an extremely low tolerance for outdated video cards. I have a Radeon 9700 and all of my settings have to be on medium or low in order to play without serious loading times and lag. Oh, and the water is AMAZING. SOUND: 9 Good sound, great gun sounds and voice commands, and with the VOIP, you can actually talk to people with a headset. The only problems are that almost no one right now uses the headsets and talk with each other, since almost everything you need to say is in the comma rose, and also there's like 2 different kinds of loading music which you will begin to loathe after the first 10 games. Overall, great sound. VALUE: 10 Infinite amounts of internet play and single player games, and with each game being totally different from the last, you will never get bored. The whole gaining rank thing, earning new medals and unlocking new guns definitely adds a TON of value to the game (I mean, who doesn't want 7 new AWESOME looking guns that are more powerful versions of the originals?) This is the game i will be playing all summer and even after that. TILT: 10 Despite some serious issues with the internet play, some bugs and problems, and long loading times, BF2 is an AWESOME and XTREME game that you should definitely buy if you have the right computer for it. And if you don't have the computer for it, upgrade your old one so you can play this game. Yeah, it's that good. There's a loading sequence at the beginning of the game that shows multiple squads of enemies charging a US base and being gunned down, then an enemy helicopeter flying over and taking out the US soldiers slaughtering the enemies, then an airplane taking down the helicopter and another plane. The sequence is totally awesome, and the scary thing is that all of that is really possible in that game (I've done it multiple times already, and each time i feel like it was the coolest thing ever!). I love this game, and in my opinion might get GoTY. 
