Grab the demo here or wherever it is you get your demos from.
I’m moderately dissapointed. It feels like a really good mod, rather than a new game. Yet they’re still gonna charge $50-$60 for it.
The aircraft are just reskinned/modelled BF2 helicopters for the most part. They still have the same boring/laughable flight model and fly the same way. At least they have an excuse - they’re magical antigrav hovercraft. It’s pretty comical that BF2 helicopters, which aren’t magical antigrav hovercraft, handled the same way.
The guns are just furistic looking versions of the same thing. Playing on an infantry map, aside from the models on the guns and the new maps, you wouldn’t know you weren’t playing BF2. You’ve got your pistol, sniper rifle, assault rifle, machine gun. All totally standard. All exactly like BF2 guns, except for looks. And then there’s your standard RPG/TOW hybrid rocket.
It would be nice if they tried to be innovative in some way with this. Futuristic? How about some quick-draining beam weapons, or something? They could have short burst times and long reload times to keep it balanced and yet give a different option to gameplay. Or something. Maybe a class with a short-duration jetpack. I don’t know. Something other than exactly the same infantry in the previous game.
The hovertank things are just tanks that handle slightly differently. The stationary guns work pretty much identically to BF2, except the EMP cannon, which is indeed kind of a cool idea - it disables vehicles for a few seconds if you hit them. The APC and jeep things act pretty much just like APCs and jeeps.
The mechs are the only things that are significantly different and new.
There’s a new game mode - the titan mode, and while it’s good and fun, it’s not a huge depature from the previous gameplay. Still, it’s a welcome change. The Titans themselves are, I suppose, a new type of vehicle - they’re kind of like giant floating aircraft carriers.
They’ve barely made any progress in removing the bad programming/bad design/other stuff from their engine. I mean - if they’re not going to significantly upgrade the engine and still charge full price for the game, you’d think they could weed out all the little problems.
For example, I posted this in another thread:
"Second, STUPID, STUPID engine bugs/lack of features/whatever persist despite years and years of work and what must be a huge development team. They’ve got to have the dumbest quality assurance people in the business working for them. For example: This is something that bothered me with the original bf1942, and 6 (?) years later, it’s still there - if you type fast, it drops characters. It’s ridiculous. It won’t even let you type a full sentence without mangling it if you type at a fast speed at all.
There are no restrictions on spamming by spaz game retards. The game uses a comm system that allows people to select predefined messages (like “ENEMY SPOTTED”) and has them vocalized to everyone on their team. When you have 20+ people on a team, and EVERY ONE OF THE SPAZZY GAMER RETARDS has to hit “ENEMY SPOTTED” 6 TIMES IN A ROW EVERY TIME THEY SEE AN ENEMY, you have nothing but constant, pointless noise spam in the game.
This is incredibly retarded. First, no one should be able to spam. This would be so easy to fix - make it so you can’t use the same comm in a row, or even just make it so you can only use one every 10 seconds. As they are, they are useless - you have to tune them out because all people do is spam irrelevant information, often on purpose in the 13-year-old-attention-whore-spaz sort of way. And there is, as far as I can see, no mechanism for ignoring someone who constantly abuses this. You just have to put up with noise spam constantly. It drowns out hearing enemies and stuff… you might as well play the game with the sound off… which I may actually start doing. How pathetic is that?"
To add a thought: They also don’t differentiate typed text from the text in these messages. They’re in the same area, and they’re the same color, so when you ignore the automated message spam, you also ignore typed messages. End result is that in this game that relies heavily on teamwork, you can’t actually globally communicate with your team, because no one is looking.
Battlefield: Vietnam only cost $30… I’m guessing because it wasn’t a radical depature from the BF1942 engine and such and they felt like it didn’t deserve the full price of a new game. Well, this one certainly doesn’t either. If it was priced as a $20-$30 official update/conversion/expansion/whatever to BF2, it’d be easier to stomache. But as a full priced, stand alone game, it doesn’t really offer all that much.