Got this game recently to join in with a friend on some killing runs, and since quite frankly so many of the games lately have sucked. I'm not sure if my utter disappointment with this game comes from playing way too much UT2K4 or not. I'm playing it atm extensivly as a stress reliever, only to find it's a stress causer. This is the first game I've actually went to the store and bought in years, and I question if I ever will again. EA's motto is challenge everything, they must be out to see how many bad games with piss poor coding and bugs they can release, while still making millions off of them. Several of the games I've reviewed are EA games, and they've pretty much universally not worked right, been buggy, or had blatant false advertising (any Lionhead game) this is no different. Features that were present in previous BF games are nonexistant, and the coding choices make my brain hurt.

-Controls/Menu: Very unresponsive, even with sensitivity cranked way up. The in game controls feel as if you are moving through water sometimes. In air combat I simply cannot do, despite seeing others pull of various aerial feats of magic. Considering the hours I've logged in MS's flight simulator, the planes in Planetside, amoung various other games, it stupifies me that I can barely make a turn in this game without crashing, or going into a unrecoverable spin.

I'm not even going to get into the pathetic menu coding, where if you hit escape, it takes 3-5+ seconds for the menu to load, since some idiot @ EA/DICE thought it'd be cool to have a moving black and white movie in the main menu. I'm not going to rant about how if you sprint, it usually breaks whenever weapon you're holding in your hand for a few seconds after you stop, especially grenades. Do not run while charging a grenade throw, as when you release the mouse button, it won't throw, it'll randomly release itself, often killing you or whomever is near you accidentally.

Speaking of accidental, it seems one of the best ways to rack up kills is to use grenades, or the commanders artillery strikes. As a infantry unit I've lost track the amount of times I've died to TK grenades. There's a radar there, common sense says not to toss 'nades when you can clearly see where your men are. On the flip side of that, making a TK, if they choose to punish you, deducts -4 points from your score. If they choose not to punish you, nothing happens. Guess with one most idiots pick, even if it's clearly there fault? You get a little warning pop up on your HUD if you're close to a friendly mine, and they're also extremly visible, there's no excsue to friendly deaths via mines, especially in some of the out of the way places I've seen folks get TK'ed in.

Some of these folks are so retarded, I've lobbed a 'nade into a enemy infested alleyway, only to see the squad that was standing next to me watching me throw the 'nade over the wall, run around me from a dead stop, into the death trap. Bam -16 to my score.

I'm not usually a stat/score whore, but you need points and kill, and not to make TKs, in order to get alot of the medals, and later ranks, and most importantly weapon unlocks as the ones you start with initially are trash. I swear to god it's like playing with Gomer Pyle at your side on alot of these maps.


-Aiming/Hitboxes: This game has the absolute worst hitbox/hit detection I've ever seen. Playing sniper I can shoot someone literally 5 feet away from me, and the bullet doesn't register a hit. Similarly, using the anti-tank weapon, a large RPG, the projectile has next to zero splash damage, and I've seen it go right through soliders standing in front of the tank, and hit the tank. It doesn't help that it often takes 3-5+ shots to kill a tank, by which time unless your chosen diety himself is holding your hand, the tank will of spotted you and killed you.

I play mostly defensive sniper in online game, protecting my teams assets. This game shoots that playstyle to hell and back. The sniping scopes are so useless they may as well be nonexistant, and as mentioned before, unreliable. I most expressly dislike the bolt action sniper rifles, as it's a pain in the butt to get a headshot, almost impossible when the target is moving, due to horrible zoom (it cannot be more then 1.5x) for the bolt action, you shot once.. wait 2-3+ seconds, shoot again. Well by then the target's moved, and he's only down 50-60% of his life. Woot. The chinese and middle eastern sniper rifles are a bit better, being semi-automatic, but the recoil on them is just as bad, and the damage is a bit worse. 3-4 shots in the torso with those to kill someone.

-Gameplay online: Spawnraping, spawnkilling, spawncamping,etc. Spawn, Die to artillery strike. Spawn, die to grenade camper x4, spawn die to sniper, spawn by this spawn the artillery is back up, and you're probably going to die again. This wouldn't be so effing annoying if the spawn time didn't vary from 10-15 seconds. When you spend most of your time dead, only to finally get out alive, and then have the poor hitbox detection F. you over and die again only to repeat the cycle, you want to punch the monitor.

There's not always an option to spawn elsewhere either, as alot of the maps one of the teams starts controlling everything but one base. Those are fun, as in anything higher then a 16/16 map, all possible routes out of the base are covered by snipers or tanks.

Trying to get the online server browser to work is like pulling teeth. Some of the filters for the servers are documented as broken, and you'll often wind up with no servers on the list, and no way to get any with a reboot, or clicking filters and refresh randomly to try to find out what broke the list this time. You cannot name friends in this, nor track down what server they're on unless you think ahead and use yahoo or some other voice system. Xfire is suggested by many of the folks I've run into, but it's voice support is crap, and the box it puts up on screen lags the game badly, even causing it to freeze up if you try to chat during level loads. Yahoo I've found works the best for voice chat, but with no real way to turn off a majority of the sound, even when you've turned the settings to 0% volume, you often can't hear one another.


The game also contains vehicles. I've only managed to ride in them several times out maybe 1000+ possible chances, because they get snapped up quickly. In large levels it is utterly boring to walk forever, and playing in smaller servers is pointless as everyone just goes sniper so they don't have to walk as far to see you and kill you. The aiming in these vehicles is like trying to shoot someone, while jumping on a trampoline, while heavily medicated, while the trampoline is being moved on the back of an offroad truck. It's that bad. Unless it's at a complete stop, you ain't gonna hit jack unless you are one lucky SOB. The damage they do also is unrealistic, if I shoot at you with a truck mounted .50 cal++ bullet at 100+ rounds a minute and you're five feet away you're gone. No shooting you 5-6 times to die, one shot in the middle, and you have a split personality, or at least a massive hole. Other then the tank, which can actually take some hits, all of the other vehicles need only be driven over slight bumps to take damage, and have pathetic accelration going up grade. To be driving a dunebuggy, flying on a straight road, and start up a grade you can see the slow down and wonder why the vehicles have lawnmower engines.

EA/DICE also opted to put in this horrible idea of blurring your entire screen if you get close to death, or if you are near a massive sound explosion. It makes the whole screen look as if you've just down a bottle of Smirnoff, with your glasses/contacts out, while looking through the bottom of aforementioned bottle. It happens often enough to make me irate, especially when I'm on the other side of a concrete wall, and have suffered no damage from the grenade.

Graphics: 6 out of 10, maybe higher when my Nvidia 6800 gets here, atm I'm using a fx5200 which a good friend gave me, since my Radeon 9250 256 meg card won't even let me start the game, despite being supported. I'm not overly impressed with how everyone basically looks the same, save for a few packs draped over their character indicating what kit they are.

EA has also recently released a Special Forces expansion back, which is basically a 30$ upgrade so you can unlock much better weapons that enable you to destroy folks that are stuck with the inaccurate as hell weapons that come with the game. Having just bought BF2, only to be utterly owned by a rifle that is for standard infantry, yet is accurate as a sniper rifle as long as it's not burst. The killspam from folks with the F2000 just sucks.

I'm not even going to get into flashbangs, and how utterly f-ed they are. It's like instant win. The effect for the totally blinds your screen, no matter where you are, if you're looking at that area, you're screwed. In a tank? tough. I've had them affect me, while I was in the commander screen giving order, zoomed in. Keep in mind I'm a mile or more away from the actual site and I'm looking in via a satellite relay.

Voice over IP: Horrible support. The system is garbled as hell and then some, and alot of the server enforce 50-99ms auto kick ping rules. When you have this turned on and some idiot in your squad starts screaming nonsensical )(@*^ you often wind up getting kicked if your ping increases a hair over. Which then you get to deal with the 1-3 minute load times as the game verify's your data. I have 1gb of DDR, and a 2gb pagefile atm, that bought the loading time down from 4+ minutes, but that is just utter crap. Especially considering you often wind up disconnected due to stupid TK's.

The commander screen is a horrible cluster f*** of icons and unusability, I've yet to find a way to tell who the hell is who when they ask for something if they don't use the very limit "smart" radio. It also responds slow, and it's zoom function is either way out, or way in. It has a middle setting, but it's just a hair closer then 1x zoom, and is useless. You wind up with so many icons close together that you simply cannot tell what's going on.

Say a guy named Alpha in squad 1 asks for an ammo drop. Well I see his name, now where the hell is he? Clicking on the 1 icon turns all 2-6 players in that squad into white dots, helpful if they aren't in the middle of a ton of other guys, which they usually aren't b/c teamwork in this game means everyone int he squad has to be in a totally different location due to stupidity. Looking @ the dots I can tell at least one of them is in dire need of a resupply, but there's no way to tell who's which dot that I could figure out, shot of zooming all the way into each dot.

Don't get the resupply crate that recharges every 1+ minute or so? Don't use the artillery more often the the 3-4+ minutes recharge timer allows you to? Don't part your hair the correct way? Mutiny options spike up in a heartbeat. It is impossible to force anyone to listen to you, not to mention it's impossible to constantly keep artillery and satellite scans going as they are on a timer, but all folks see if you're not following them around holding their hand, and so they vote you out. I've come to the conclusion that it's not the commander spot they don't want you to have, it's that they want it themselves b/c at the end of the round, the winning commander gets a x2 multiplier tacked onto his score. Just recently I had a round where we went from controlling 9/10 bases, everyone was listening to me, to being voted out of power thanks to a single teamkill when the idiot went wandering into the area I was firing upon with the mortor strike, despite the giant red cannon symbol flashing with a area of effect radius displayed. That was enough to get my side to dismiss me from control, and some other idiot who didn't know where they were doing took over and within 15 minutes we lost everything. Voting out a commander or player is something you need no reason to do, and most folks either opt out of voting, or they just hit Yes straight off just to get the lil voting message off their screen.


Overall: A good, well organize team could utterly own in this game, sadly no one knows how to work together. Long load times, unresponsive controls, pisspoor aiming system, and unfairness since the SF expansion make me want to snap the discs. I'm continuing playing to get my money's worth out of this game, and to simply see if I can figure out how the hell to pilot some of these vehicles. I've no fun constantly being raped, without a way to get out. Some of the best games I've had have been on smaller servers of 24/24, but with the length of some of the maps, you wind up walking forever to find someone, or everyone is in a badly controlled vehicle and you're stuck fighting the controls to be on fair ground.

They use Punkbuster for cheating protection, but I honestly doubt if it works for anything other then totally blatant stuff in this game, I've seen a single man rack up dozens of kills, while never dieing and running into the middle of us all setting off his C-4. We all died, he lived, he was closer to the c-4 then us, go figure. And yes his own stuff can affect him. Considering this was on the official EA server, I doubt someone with such a profane name as his was working @ EA as an admin.



Pros: probably the graphics once my new card gets here and is able to run everything. Currently I'm playing @ 800x600, everything on low, with 75% view distance. The jagginess hurts my eyes.

Cons: Most everything else. Bugs in the menus, horrible choice of content for the menus in the form of a CCTV Satellite overflight movie, bad controls, bad atmosphere online b/c everyone is stat whoring to be able to get weapons that actually shoot sort of where you're aiming, etc.

 

Another reason not to use Xbox 360

 

? Playing it on PC, not Xbox360, if that's what you mean, not clear on what ya mean.

 

I misunderstood you. I thought you were talking about Xbox 360. It happens a lot for me

 

Mid... i can sum up everything wrong with this in just TWO letters... E.. A ...

In the last five or so years theyre quality has dropped SERVERELY! .. i remember back in the day when EA was a good thing... youd hear EA and think hmm.. its got to be good... now... its hmm... id rather swallow razorblades...

Pity... i liked them back in the day...maybe ill abandon the Madden series and break out my SNES and Tecmo football game..