The rest of the maps offer a varying degree of good and concentrate on various parts of the game, but it's easy to want more distinct environments. While the dam does look really cool (particularly when flying around in a helicopter), this particular map is a huge pain in the ass to navigate without a vehicle - enough so that it creates a vortex of fun so that those of us in the office who have been playing now have little faith that it'll get any better with time. On the other side of the spectrum is Kubra Dam, which I have a strong distaste for.

It's a perfect map for tightly grouped infantry combat, and I suspect it'll become a favorite of those that prefer a match without a ton of huge vehicles. It's got a claustrophobic appeal that makes the experience much more intense. It combines fast-paced gameplay with good amounts of strategy in an urban setting. Strike at Karkand, for instance, is an excellent map. Some environments are better than others in terms of gameplay, while a few simply look cool. Maps aren't as diverse as I would have liked them to be but are still pretty well thought-out. Twelve different locations make Battlefield's battlefields. Each of these areas also comes with a small description about the purpose of the map, which helps explain things a bit. Most of the battle locations seem to center around oil fields, refineries or dams, which makes a kind of sense given the conflicts. Battlefield 2 is set in the near future, where plausible conflicts between the US and both China and the Middle East Coalition (a fictional faction) flare up. Any game that can make a large group of editors take a Saturday and play for 14 hours straight until 4:30 in the morning has to be pretty awesome. After playing for quite a few hours (often shirking other responsibilities), I and pretty much everyone else here at IGN will heartily recommend BF2 to fans of the series and beg those who haven't played before or didn't like the original to give the demo a whirl. But this time around, the developers at DICE and publishers at EA have set out to create a more team-oriented experience with their official sequel, and they've done a terrific job at that.īattlefield 2 is a great game.

Battlefield 2 is a lot like the original 1942, in that respect. More importantly, the pace of the game is undeniably fun, and the 'Battlefield moments' like helicopters getting sideswiped by planes, tanks exploding, bodies catapulting across the sky, and so on, are all so frickin' cool that it's near impossible to stop playing. Vehicles and infantry move realistically, and weapons have firing cones and rates that mimic actual life fairly closely (balanced for fun, of course). It offers up a unique shooter experience that you don't find elsewhere in a 'realistic' setting. The Battlefield series is a favorite around the office at IGN.

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