Inspiration usually carries with it rough edges. Delivering on a creative vision can mean losing sight of some of the details. On the other hand, a game can be polished to the point of sterility. Battlefield 2: Modern Combat feels as if it had been focus-grouped to death.
Battlefield 2 for the Xbox 360 is yet another belated port of a current-gen title, and like most of its kind, it justifies neither its extra development time nor its $60 price tag. The presentation is slick, with a chest-thumping score and rock-solid visuals. This is par for the course given the resources EA throws at its games. What the æsthetics can’t provide is a coherent feel.
It’s as if the developers couldn’t decide whether they wanted to make a tactical shooter or a balls-out action game and wound up with neither. The new feature in single-player mode is “HotSwapping,” in which you can jump into the boots of any squad mate with the push of a button. It’s a neat idea, and indeed it’s often useful to snatch up a sniper rifle on a nearby rooftop, or assume control of an anti-tank gun when it’s most needed. But controlling all your squad mates individually fails to provide the sense of scale it ought to. More often it’s just disorienting, particularly when you take control of a character on the brink of death. Either way, it’s an overture to strategy-based shooters like Brothers in Arms without even an iota of that game’s depth.
Battlefield 2 doesn’t go far enough in the direction of pure action, either, utterly failing to make you feel like a bad, bad man. Your soldiers die quickly (though you can pad your stats over the course of the game), but the real problem is the lack of tactile impact. Bullets seem to glide rather than explode out of the weapons. Characters trudge across the battlefield as if they were underwater. Combat looks and sounds great — it just doesn’t feel great.
Multi-player mayhem is another matter. The multi-player equivalent of “HotSwapping” allows you to choose one of five player classes to respawn as whenever you die. By assessing the situation on the ground, you can re-enter gameplay as the character class best calibrated to deliver maximum damage to the other team.
Combining a couple dozen players, numerous vehicles, and classic Capture the Flag gameplay ensures you’ll always encounter something awesome. But for every time you obliterate a tank carrying a squadron of interlopers, or wipe out an enemy who’s mere steps from capturing your flag, there’s a moment when you look at the scoreboard and realize that half your team has logged off. (This is probably not a problem in clan matches.) A mode called Conquest is a tried and true capture-and-hold game that’s slightly more cerebral than Capture the Flag. And by “cerebral,” I mean boring.
You can certainly have fun with this one. Calling strangers douchebags on the Xbox Live headset tends to make anything enjoyable. But that faint praise owes more to the paucity of first-person shooters on the Xbox 360 than to any triumph of Battlefield 2’s.
