Battlefield 2: Special Forces [PC]

But lets talk about the most obvious new feature: night vision and night maps. The first thing you'll probably do is remap the goggles from "7" to something that's actually close to the WASD movement keys. And I'd recommend putting the gas mask and flashbang close by as well. Flashbangs are great on night maps because goggles greatly magnify the effects, and gas is great because an affected enemy has to use his mask instead of goggles. Otherwise, his vision gets all woogly and he'll cough incessantly, giving away his position. Consider yourself lucky or very skilled if you manage to survive tear gas.

I think these additional considerations add a sometimes tense layer to infantry combat, in a rock-paper-scissors kind of way. Certain classes will now also have a grappling hook (for scaling walls) or a zip line (for safely descending and crossing to lower areas across an expanse). Zip lines only allow you to go downwards, but you can cross a dangerous street quickly that way. If you hop on one that doesn't belong to you, though, don't be surprised if its unsuspecting owner reels it back in while you're only halfway across.

But as I said earlier, there are still some quirks with the multiplayer browser. For one, it's difficult to find many populated servers with a ping under 100. Next, attempting to connect to a full server will punt you to the top of the list. The ping problem is one thing, but the punt should be easily fixable, and I don't know why it hasn't been gotten around to yet. Plus, you can click on servers that definitely have slots open, only to get punted because those slots are reserved. It would be really awesome if I could get some indication of this onscreen.

At least you can save your favorite servers and filter out… well, filtering has problems too. Sometimes applying a filter will work, but most times it clears the server list, making it difficult to find servers that are not full but not empty either. The only way to make settings stick and work appears to be applying the filters and restarting the game. This only has to be done once, naturally, but it is an odd glitch. If you want to play on both BF2 and Special Forces servers, they have specific icons (red "2" for BF2 and a green "2" for SF), so it's fairly easy to distinguish between the two types.

Map load times are also still pretty slow. It takes about a minute, which is a long time to stare at a progress bar, and I have to take exception to the progress bar only including map elements, instead of including the verification of files, which takes about as long as loading the map itself. It's a little misleading, in my opinion. And if you adjust your video card settings in-game, Special Forces has to re-optimize shaders, a process than can double the overall load time, and this kicks in even with minor items like changing screen resolution. I recommend you make sure you have everything the way you want it visually, because re-optimizing definitely doesn't cater to gradual tweakage.

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