Ruined My Life

Battlefield 2 First Impressions

Well well well, where to start with this one. As many of you probably know, the demo for Battlefield 2 was released today. Battlefield 2 is the (over)hyped sequel to Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield Vietnam. This time around Battlefield 2 was worked on by the team of Trauma Studios the same group who released Desert Combat for Battlefield 1942.

By just reading this opening remark, you can probably already tell my opinions on Battlefield 2, however keep in mind this is my critique from my first impressions, which in this case happen to be from playing the demo.

The Battlefield 2 demo weighs in at a hefty 546MB, if you’re lucky enough to get connected to a download, you will recieve a single map which can be played in single player for ten minutes or played in multiplayer. Once installed and loaded you’ll be presented with a rather sleek user interface, where you can go ahead and select your play mode. Once you’re ready to dive in to the action, you may as well go grab some food or smoke a cigarette, because you’re going to be waiting for your “shaders to optimize” on the first load up. Keep in mind I am on a AMD 64 3500+, Gig of DDR in Dual Channel, Two 120GB Seagate SATA drives in Raid 0, and a pair of eVGA 6800GT’s in SLI, and this first load took well over three minutes. I thought this load would be acceptable, since it was claiming it was optimizing shaders for my graphics selection. However after loading another game without the shader optimization it still took well over two minutes, BAD!

Finally the load finishes, and I’m presented with a menu where I have to enter the game, then select my class kit and spawn point. I spawn in the game, and the first thing I’m presented with are HUGE FUCKING BLACK BLOCKS COMING FROM SHADOWS OF PLAYER AND VEHICLE MODELS. Now I could have sworn the game was optimizing shaders for my selection, but apparently it didn’t. I throw my anger aside with the shadow ordeal, and decide to give the game a spin. I start running to my objective, and I’m tapping my F8 key looking for my good old familiar radio menu only to find out it has CHANGED! You hit Q to bring up a HORRIDLY designed radio menu system. You navigate it with your mouse, wtf? I’d rather beck at my keys, then have to move my mouse to an exact spot for a selection. Horrid move EA, than again it is EA, so what should we expect?

I get up to where the action is happening, and start fighting and think to myself, wow this feels just like Desert Combat. That isn’t inheritly a bad thing, seeing how Desert Combat is a great mod for Battlefield 1942, but in this case it is bad. The fighting is like Desert Combat, however when you do start fighting you will notice the same bugs that regular old Battlefield 1942 was plagued with for oh so long. You can hit people with grenades, and they’re just magically lifted off the ground, or tank cannons just launch people. You’d figure after five years, EA would have figured out how to fix this, than again they don’t care, they have a cash cow, why invest more to fix when they can invest none and profit.

The weapon and vehicle sounds in Battlefield 2 are great, however the radio messages are just downright annoying. The graphics are also nice, even if they are laggy as shit. With some work, Battlefield 2 could be MUCH better, however deadlines and pre-determined release dates mess all of that up. Before I make a more formal review, I will wait untill the full game is released, until then I will not touch this demo again.

Get the demo here and judge for yourself!

UPDATE
Take a gander at this article I wrote after I messed around with the game tweaking my Graphics Options for best Gameplay.
http://www.ruinedmylife.com/2005/06/12/tweaking-battlefield-2-graphics-options/

Popularity: 22% [?]

Share This