MENA Gamer - Where Game Begins

The latest instalment of the Battlefield series is here for the PC. 

Singleplayer

The Battlefield series is renowned for its multiplayer, so it was a pleasant surprise that the single player campaign was actually rather good.  The plot revolves around a mysterious super weapon originally developed by the Japanese in World War II.  The first mission is set in WWII where you are taking part in a commando raid to capture a scientist who helped develop the weapon.  After that it’s off to a near future in which the Cold War never ended and the Russians are on the attack.  You play the role of Preston Marlowe and your task, along with your three squad mates, is to track down this weapon and prevent it being used against the US.

It’s not the most original story ever, but it is well told.  Regular, short cut scenes keep the story going, the voice acting is of a good standard and the characters (the good guys anyway) have personalities a little more interesting than the usual clean cut hero.  The dialog does occasionally get a bit cheesy but normally it’s fairly functional in terms of telling the story and the characters do have a sense of humour.

The game play is linear, but like in Crysis the levels are usually large enough to allow you to use a variety of tactics to get from point A to point B, these are broken up by vehicle levels and various set piece battles. I’d say they have got the mix about right and there is enough variety within these different elements to stop the game play feeling too samey. 

The vehicle sections are pretty good by first person shooter standards, you get to use a bunch of different vehicles like tanks, Humvees, all terrain vehicles, UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicle) etc, sometimes just driving, sometimes just shooting, or driving and shooting.  There is some variety in the set piece battles, from the usual defend point A from bad guys who appear from B and then C, to destroy the attack helicopters etc.  The helicopter one was the only part of the game I did not enjoy, playing it on hard it was a struggle to shoot down 2 moving targets while avoiding their fire.  One of the better ones was where you had to descend an icy mountain that sees you have to rush from building to building finding warmth to avoid freezing to death.

Most of the time you have your squad mates with you, they’re not the greatest so you have to do most of the work yourself, but then who wants to play a game where the NPCs have all the fun?  You don’t have to worry about them getting killed as they appear to be invincible, they are fairly useful as bullet magnets and keeping the bad guys pinned down.  The enemies are reasonably smart, using a mixture a of movement and taking cover to avoid your fire, though a few could do with learning that shotguns really aren’t very accurate at long range.  Some of them, particularly during the set piece battles do seem to follow preset behaviours.

Overall the single player campaign is good, it’s not quite up there with the very best first person single player shooters out there but it is well worth playing.  It also serves as a very good introduction for those new to the Battlefield series to the game play and equipment that you will use in the multiplayer.  It’s not particularly long, I got through in around 8 hours playing though on hard difficulty, so depending on how good you are and what difficulty you choose it’ll be possible to shave a couple of hours off that.

Multiplayer

One problem that becomes obvious very quickly is the server browser, it takes at least a minute, sometimes longer, to populate the list as rather than streaming the results it has already found it waits until it has the whole server list.  Not only is that too long to sit staring at the screen it also means that by the time you get the list, the information is a minute or two out of date.  Given that most of the servers are full, this can make trying to find a server you can actually join a time consuming and frustrating experience.  The reported ping of the server is not very accurate either.  The Play Now option doesn’t fair much better, it takes about as long to find you a game and generally finds one a long way away, for example I’m in the UK and it picked out a server based in Chicago.  I played quite happily on that server so at least the game does seem to cope well with higher pings.  There have also been some connection issues where you lose connection to the EA server that verifies your login preventing you from playing online.

It’s disappointing and a little surprising that such a well established online game series has such a poor server interface and basic login problems, especially when there has been a public beta.

Once you do get on server things get a lot better.  Like any online game with team objectives, the multiplayer enjoyment can vary quite a lot depending on the other players on server; especially so for Bad Company 2 as it also has a class system.  If you are trying to rush an enemy position and most of your team have decided to be snipers then the odds are that you will fail and not have much fun in the process.  If, however, your team has a reasonable selection of different classes and make a serious effort to attempt the objective then the multiplayer is simply excellent.

In order to encourage the players to work as a team there is a squad system where up to four players operate together within the larger team.  The benefits of this are things like extra experience for squad based actions like resupply, assists, or getting a revenge kill on the enemy that just killed your squad member.  You can also spawn next to your squad members, this not only allows you to spawn right back in the action but also confers a tactical advantage if one of your squad mates gets behind enemy lines.  You can create your own squads so you can play in squads with your friends, or leave the randomly assigned squads to join another one.  I really like this feature, it’s not just some pointless add on, it genuinely improves the gaming experience.  An option to create a squad with friends before finding a game would have been nice, as it is you just have to try to gather on a particular server and given the server browser speed and how many servers are full that’s no easy task.

As with the single player the majority of buildings and scenery are destructible and as finding cover is very important to staying alive, having it blown away adds an extra challenge.  It works both ways, not only can you find yourself suddenly exposed or with a building collapsing on you, you can also destroy bits of scenery to give yourself a new firing position on the enemy.  Plus blowing stuff up is cool.  It definitely adds to the intensity when you’re under heavy attack and everything around you is being flattened.

There are a couple of issues in game.  The most notable, and surprising, is an absence of any kind of auto team balance, the lack of which can quickly turn a game into an utterly futile exercise.  I can only assume, and hope, that this will be included in some future patch because stacked teams ruin games.  They’ve also gone for the all too common in recent first person shooters; the amazingly lethal knife.  So it’s quite common to have someone run right at you and despite shooting them four or five times all they have to do is wave a knife at you and you die.

There are four game types:

-          Rush.  Where you are either defending or trying to destroy pairs of M-COM stations.

-          Conquest.  Capture and hold more flags for longer than the opposition.

-          Squad rush.  Like rush but between two four man squads.

-          Squad deathmatch.  Four squads trying to kill each other.

So far I prefer rush out of the game types, desperately trying to stop the enemy destroying your final M-COM station or destroy their final one as the time runs down can be about as much fun as it’s possible to have in an online FPS game.  Conquest is a little more open with the objectives available in any order on large maps, while still enjoyable it can take a little while to get used to for those of us used to smaller maps.

The number of players is limited to 32 for some reason on conquest and rush, 16 on squad deathmatch and 8 on squad rush.  There is also a hardcore mode which removes your crosshair, increases damage, removes the mini map and the on screen spotting display.  Spotting is an on screen display that shows the position of enemies that your team mates have spotted, to spot an enemy you have to press q (also used to call for ammo, a medic or a ride).  It’s a useful feature for providing your team with information, you get an xp bonus if someone you spot gets killed and snipers can actually do something useful for a change.

Four classes to choose from:

-          Assault.  Armed unsurprisingly with an assault rifle and grenade launcher to start with, they can drop resupply crates.

-          Engineer.  Armed with a sub machine gun and Rocket launcher, they are able to repair damaged vehicles.

-          Medic.  Armed with a light machine gun, they can also drop medical supplies to heal team mates or carry resuscitation paddles that revive fallen team mates.  You can also kill the enemy with them as I found out in a rather humiliating way.

-          Recon.  The sniper, also armed with C4 and with more experience mortar strikes.

Each class has its own weapons, equipment and special abilities that can be unlocked by gaining experience points and increasing your rank.  You have an overall rank which unlocks non class specific weapons, equipment and abilities, then there is the class specific experience that you only get from kills gained while playing as that class or from using class specific abilities.  Additional experience can be gained by achieving certain insignia requirements like 50 squad heals and 50 squad revives, or completing pin (badge) challenges like 7 resupplies or 4 grenade kills in one round.

The experience and rank system works very well, it provides some useful stuff and if you are into completing challenges then there are plenty to go at.

The graphics are very good, the only minor complaint is that some of the sand and snow effects that limit your visibility are a bit over the top.  It’s fine when descending a mountain in a blizzard, on a windswept desert or when stuff has just blown up but on a few levels the effects seem out of place.  On the single player the bad guys don’t seem to have any problem seeing through it, it’s much of an issue on the multiplayer.

A good single player game, an excellent multiplayer game sadly lumbered with a poor server browser and some connection problems at the moment, but still highly recommended.