Of Wars and Battles … Battlefield 2 …

Battlefield 2, also knows as the BF2 in the inner circles, is PC game in which players fight in a modern battlefield using state-of-the-art firearms and vehicles. It is one of those War simulation games. It’s a first-person shooter (FPS) with some strategy and Role Playing Game (RPG) elements thrown in.

Now before I start to talk about it, I must confess few things.
First, I am not a FPS fan. In fact, I would avoid FPS if I have a choice. Except Halo, Halo2, those I love.
Secondly, I am not a fan of war games, too violent games.
And finally, I like playing games on the consoles using the controllers.

Now don’t be judgmental. Yes, I approached BF2 with skepticism and reluctance. Yes, I would have not picked it up myself, at the gaming counters at Best Buy or Circuit City. But I did (upon recommendation) and I must admit, I am hooked. Although I suck at it, I get killed a lot, by many of 15 year olds who probably spend their nights aiming their sniper rifles and assault rifles on newbie like me.

Let’s see how the game is. It’s great. There are two main game modes, Conquest and Co-op game play.

“Conquest” (which is also Battlefield 2’s only officially ranked game mode) is to reduce the opposing team’s “tickets” to zero. This can be accomplished by capturing flags, forcing the opposing team to respawn players (by killing them), or both. By capturing flags, the team with less than half of the flags or failing to capture a certain number of flags (depending on the map) will have their tickets gradually diminish. By killing an opponent, his or her team’s ticket will decrement by one once the player respawns. Furthermore, if a team has nowhere to spawn and all of its members are dead, their ticket count will instantly go to zero.

“Co-op” game play is same as conquest mode except that players also play with and against computers or known as “bots”. This game mode is not part of the ranking system.
There are huge number of servers (and you can set-up one too) and you can play against many people (that’s where I get killed a lot).

You have infantry like assault, sniper, medic, support, anti-tank and bunch of vehicles that a player can navigate into waters, ground or air. The Co-op mode has options to have 1 to 6 men squads, you can play commander and there are bunch of maps and expansion packs that add even more maps. There are few websites where users have added a whole bunch of gamer-communit-created maps, that may add hours more to the gameplay.
The game play is smooth and great, except minor bugs that you can come across. They do get addressed by the patches that EA releases. It is one of the highest rated war games out there – both by users as well as critics.
I give it 10/10 rating. All I need now is to be able to put more hours towards it and be the hunter.

JPS Nagi
April 2007
Originally published on Gamespot.com https://www.gamespot.com/profile/blog/of-wars-and-battles-battlefield-2/24976670/