All too often the support roles in games like this are thankless jobs. You run around healing your teammates so that they can grab all of the glory and have all of the fun. However, BF2 has an extensive ranking and statistics system in place that finally gives these critical support players their due. Healing other players or repairing vehicles will earn you points that will affect your standing once the game is complete (of course points are also awarded for offensive accomplishments such as kills or base captures). Furthermore, your performance will be tracked persistently and the points that you score over time will earn you promotions to higher ranks and medals. The number of stats the game tracks is impressive and you’ll spend plenty of time combing through your stats in the same way that baseball fans study box scores. The point system also gives the game a touch of that MMORPG quality that keeps you playing just a little but longer in order to earn a new level before calling it quits for the night.

You gotta love firepower.

The games themselves are all of the assault/conquest variety – no death matches or CTF here. Each side starts with one or more bases that provide it with “tickets”, which are points spent to spawn players after they are killed. Capturing bases provides more tickets for your side while denying tickets to the enemy. When one side’s supply of tickets is reduced to zero, the game ends and the other side is victorious. While it is standard for multiplayer shooters to provide a variety of game types, BF2 does not suffer from the fact that it only has one. The maps are geared specifically for assault games as is the whole game for a matter of fact, and you’ll be having so much fun with it that you won’t even stop to wish for a round of CTF.

If you’ve played online shooters before, you know that many of the team-based games are essentially free-for-alls where you can only shoot at half of the other players. Players are essentially lone gunmen who just happen to share a similar goal. BF2 attempts to bring some order to this chaos through the best set of team management features yet to appear in an online game. One player can act as the commander for a side, issuing orders to player groups in the field. These player groups are organized into squads of up to six soldiers each. In a nice touch, players can spawn into the same vehicle or base as their squad leader, so squads are able to stay together as cohesive units even after taking some losses. With a two-tiered command structure in place, teams can actually put together coordinated strikes or mount an effective defense. Player chat can be confined to intra-squad and squad-commander channels to keep the chatter relevant to the task at hand. As an added feature, commanders have the ability to call in artillery strikes or to monitor enemy movements via satellite. To prevent such powers from dominating the game, the artillery batteries are vulnerable to attack and satellite surveillance can be taken out by destroying the enemy’s satellite communications vehicle. Using the command structure is entirely optional, so if you prefer the free-for-all style of play you’ll have no trouble finding a server with those types of games.

BF2 is all about multiplayer action, but it does ship with a single player component. However, the single player side of the game is simply a local version of the multiplayer game played against AI-controlled bots. The single player game is best used as a way to check out the maps before going online, but unfortunately you’ll only be able to play the 16 player version of each map. The bots in the game are better than the average bots you find in such games and definitely a cut above those found in Battlefield 1942. However they are no substitute for real players and you’ll probably only spend time with the single player game during your first few plays of BF2. There’s not enough to the single player aspect of the game to make the game recommendable to those of you who would never take BF2 online.

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