Bee Eff Too: Em See

I apologize for not posting for quite some time. I have been pretty busy school wise, and when I'm not doing school work I am doing nothing. Being idle is quite time consuming, believe it or not.

And when I'm not doing anything, I have been playing Battlefield 2: Modern Combat. I gave a brief review of the online demo a while ago and if you remember I loved it. The game play was quick, rewarding, and was my favorite game on Live. The game had some issues, mostly network related, but it was an EA demo, so I didn't expect much. Also some aspects seem unbalanced. Killing someone with a support player took skill, killing someone with a grenade launcher took an index finger. Well, the full version was released last week and I have been playing on and off and I must say it is pretty good.

The game was delayed a year for EA to add a single player game, and I guess it was worth the wait. The single player of the game follows a story about deception and propaganda. I didn't buy the game for the story and I have been skipping all the cut-scenes so I don't really know if the story is all that amazing. The play mechanics of the single player are pretty similar to the multiplayer. You fight with a squad of varying size. They do a pretty good job at killing and not getting killed. You can manage the whole army on your own though, by hot-swapping. If you have a clear line of site with an ally, you can take control of him while the computer will move into your vacated body. This is useful if you need or want to use a certain weapon kit (Assault, Sniper, Special Ops., Engineer, Support) or if you current body is close to dying. You can die but you are punished by losing major points for it.

From what I have played the missions seem to consist of kill all enemies and secure the area. I however am not very far in the game, but I have read of more interesting missions later in the game. Many times I find my allies dying and me just trying to stay alive as one lone soldier waiting for re-enforcements, but I am not very good at the game so it is probably my fault. I wouldn't buy the game just for the single player however, so for those of you without live, this may be a rental.

Now, I know I didn't buy this game for the single player and when it comes to the multiplayer the game is pretty strong. In terms of options this game is pretty limited. There are two basic game types, capture the flag where you capture the enemies flag and return it to your base with some variations. The other type is conquest, in which you capture points on a map and protect them while trying to keep the majority of the points. This game type also has some variations such as allowing the capture of all the points, which stops the other team from spawning, and essentially winning the game, or always allowing either team to spawn letting the game run much longer. I only play conquest because I see it as a more intense and rewarding game, however a good CTF on a small map can be pretty fun.

The game is run on EA's servers. Anyone who has played an EA game on Live knows they have quite a talent of royally screwing up an almost perfect system. Simple things like the friends list and sending voice messages are made needlessly complicated. Since the game is run entirely on their servers, one cannot create a private room and invite just their friends in. For me this is not a problem seeing as how I don't play with a large number of friends. The gametypes on the servers are pretty diverse so you can normally find a good game. What some would consider a feature, on most servers when a round is over you have a limited time to vote on the next map played. The problem is that people vote for the same two maps, ABridgeTooFar and Backstab. ABridgeTooFar is a great map, the first 50 times. And Backstab is the map from the demo and considering I have played that level a couple of hundred times it is getting a little old. There are plenty of other maps and most of them are pretty good, there are really only one or two maps I can say I don't care for.

When you don't feel like hoofing it on the maps there are always the option of vehicles. They range from basic cars, humvees, tanks, boats, and helicopters of all sorts. The vehicles in this game add a whole new dimension to the game and lead to the most fun events in the game. Whether you are in a boat chasing another boat, of a helicopter in pursuit of a car or tank, they add to the excitement and overall enjoyment of the game.

When the game was released the online portion had some issues with disconnecting players, or not letting them connect to games. Shortly afterwards a patch was released which remedied this problems. However it created unbearable lag. As of now I hear that the lag has disappeared or at least been reduced to the normal amount of lag. The stats were resetting for a while when the game was released, but I think this problem has been fixed as well. Gameplay wise the game is pretty strong. The classes are balanced, the previous problems with balance have been fixed for the full release. Assuming EA keeps tabs on this game and provides maintenence when needed, hopefully this game will last a while.

To anyone with Live and a mild interest in shooters, I recommend this game. Whether or not it will last long is up to EA and the players but as of right now, it is a fresh new game that I believe Live has been in need of for some time now.