Battlefield 2: Special Forces Review

The expansion pack: the ultimate in low-risk, low-cost, high-reward games developing. Pick a successful game. Take its toolset. Give them to a group of moderately well-motivated games developers. Add a tweak here, a new feature there, a handful of new maps, and you’ve got the recipe for a DVD-ROM crammed full of ‘more of the same, but better!’ you can bundle into a case, stick quickly onto the shelves at the mid-range price point, and everyone’s happy. There’s just one problem with this model of games development: expansion packs very rarely, if ever, are as good as the progenitor that spawned them. So the question you need to ask when you think about buying a game expansion is this: “Does this really give me value for money?”

A quick inspection of the new features list is promising. Zip lines for the Sniper and Special Ops kits, to allow rapid descents from roofs or balconies; grappling hooks for Assault and Anti-Tank kits, to allow you to climb any wall; Flash Bang grenades, which stun and blind enemies; Tear gas; Night Vision goggles; Gas Masks and over half a dozen new vehicles, ranging from ATV (that’s ‘All Terrain Vehicle’, for those of you who don’t speak Three Letter Acronym) quad-bikes to the fearsome Apache and Hind helicopter gunships. Somewhat less impressive is the number of bundled maps: just eight, only six of which can be played offline. The maps are all quite well designed, however, my personal favourites being Surge (a Russian missile base) and Warlord, a Middle Eastern town and palatial compound, which according to the manual is in “Fallujah, Afghanistan”. I think someone needs to tell EA’s manual writer that Fallujah is actually in Iraq… d’oh!

It’s just as well that this is a game designed to be played online, because the offline experience isn’t really up to much. The bots are dumber than a bag of hammers, even at Expert difficulty: I’ve stood watching, absolutely stupefied, as these hapless automatons have tried to drive Hummers through the corners of buildings for minutes on end, or seen them run backwards to the next control point, their weapons pointing back towards the secure area they’ve just cleared. So, offline play is best avoided for any purpose other than learning the maps: the real fun is in playing other people – people who know that cars can’t drive through buildings.

When you get into the nitty-gritty of serious online play, you quickly begin to realise that some of these new features might not be all they’re cracked up to be. The grappling hooks and zip lines are fun enough, but they do have their limitations. Usually, if a rooftop is worth going on, there’ll be a ladder leading up to it, which kind of defeats the object of having the grappling hook at all. It can be used practically in a few situations (say if want to enter a building via a second floor window), but opportunities to use it can be few and far between. The same applies to the zip line. If you’re playing a sniper kit, then yes, they can be handy if you’ve been rumbled and want to make a swift getaway from the chimney stack you’ve been using as an overwatch position, but that just highlights the question of deployment. Zip lines and grappling hooks take time to use, and during that time, you can’t use your weapon, which in a fast-moving game like this, is a real problem. You’re one big, helpless target climbing a grapple rope or descending a zip line, so you have to assess the risk of using them before you stow away your rifle for those vital few seconds.

Night vision is another feature that looks great on paper, but has gone slightly astray in the implementation. There’s no denying that fighting with light-amplification goggles is very atmospheric. It’s just a shame that certain design choices and the maps don’t allow you to use them to their full potential. The night maps don’t have a consistent level of lighting, meaning that you have to constantly put on and take off your goggles whenever you hit a patch of darkness or a pool of light, which is bloody annoying, quite frankly. Not only that, the light-amp totally knocks out your colour perception, meaning that maps become far harder to navigate, because it’s practically impossible to distinguish one type of terrain from another. You’ll no doubt be thrilled to hear then that one of the night maps, Devil’s Perch, contains all manner of tortuous twists and turns, nooks, crannies and alleyways, and has plenty of rough terrain for you to get stuck on. Not only that, the light-amp is time-limited and runs on a battery, so if it runs out of juice whilst you’re in the middle of a firefight in the pitch black, you’re (to use the parlance of our time) fuX0r’d. One new feature that does really pay off on night maps is the Flash Bang. Bright lights tend to make your vision wash out if you’re wearing a light-amp, so you can imagine the calamitous effect a Flash Bang will have. Not only do you have the concussive effect that makes an enemy player lose their sense of hearing for a dozen seconds or so, they’ll be utterly blinded when the light-amp whites out. It’s hilarious to watch the reactions of some players, as they scrabble around desperately for cover, deaf, dumb and blind to the world. It’s almost an act of mercy putting them out of their misery.

Tear gas is an equal source of hilarity, as you get players stumbling around coughing and retching, their vision blurred beyond recognition. The debilitative effects in general are impressive: stand next to a T-90 tank when it fires its main gun, and you’ll see what I mean. You do genuinely get a feel for what the concussive effects feel like, and it adds an authentic, realistic edge to the game. The ballistics let the game down somewhat, however. The Support kit is best avoided entirely, because you’ve got a better chance of winning the lottery than of actually hitting anything with your machine gun. The submachine guns used by the Anti-Tank kits are also hideously inaccurate at anything other than point-blank range, so with these two soldier kits you’re actually more likely to get kills with your backup pistol than your primary weapon. Even using short bursts of automatic fire to minimise recoil doesn’t seem to help. Still, at least the weapon ballistics are more reliable than in Joint Operations, where dowsing an enemy in the chest at point-blank range with the leaden contents of a full magazine from an M4 carbine wouldn’t result in a kill on frustratingly regular occasions.

The expansion pack has tried to redress the balance of its parent game to reduce the dominance of vehicles and place more of an emphasis on the humble infantryman. On the whole, it works, as the tighter maps make infantry combat a more realistic proposition, and there are plenty of defensive positions around to help deal with vehicles. Vehicles still have a role to play, particularly on larger maps like Leviathan, but you can quite happily spend most of your time on foot and still compete for the top of the leaderboard. It’s still a satisfying game to play: dropping a rifle grenade at the feet of an enemy from 150 metres and seeing them catapulted into the air by the explosion is joyous, and it’s little moments like this that keep you coming back regularly, despite all the usual online shooter problems; such as respawning at a control point just in time for an enemy artillery attack, or getting revived by a medic only to be shot again by the same person who killed you in the first place, before you can even take a step… these are the kind of annoyances you have to live with and accept as an online shooter player; if you can’t cope with these, then there’s no point taking the box off the shelf, because it happens to everyone. In fact, it’s only the knowledge that it happens to other people as well that makes it bearable at all…

So, is Special Forces good value? Yes, and yet, no. Battlefield 2 is quite rightly regarded as one of the best online shooters of recent years, and Special Forces does add some spice to an already winning recipe. Unfortunately, seemingly nothing has been done to address its more serious flaws. The server browser is still a desperately unfriendly thing to use, as the filters don’t work properly and loading times are terrible: I’ve seen tectonic plates move faster. In-game performance is also an issue, as even with 1MB broadband you’re still likely to experience lag and dropped connections aplenty. Then there’s the question of the 280MB patch you’ll need to download and apply, as it wasn’t included on the game disk. So if you had it previously installed before purchasing the expansion, you’re going to need to apply it again… fingers crossed you kept the patch file on your desktop. So then, in some respects, it’s more Special Needs than Special Forces. With only eight new maps for your money, it’s a personal judgment call as to whether you think it’s worth it or not – in my opinion, it’s pretty marginal. Yes, it gives you new maps, but not enough of them. Yes, it gives you new toys, but not enough of an opportunity to really make use of them. Yes, it’s great fun, but it can get a little repetitive after a while. If you’re a Battlefield addict, then it’s undoubtedly worth a punt. Just don’t expect shock and awe, that’s all.