BF2 Special Forces

Nov 29, 2005

Of the things that are inevitable, a Battlefield expansion ranks right up there with death, taxes and the end of the world. Thankfully, Special Forces is more fun than the others on the list, although it does have its own aggravations. The inclusion of elite military groups is more cosmetic than anything else, and there are still problems with the server browser, but the new vehicles and new maps are a welcome inclusion to what is already quite a solid multiplayer shooter. And the Brits should be pleased to have their own SAS shouting British things like "Oi!" and "Cheers, mate!"

And the maps actually having a pleasing variety to them -- no small feat, since there's only eight to go around. They are mostly urban and always densely arranged, with more building interiors than before, some of them quite extensive. Some of them don't feel much different from their BF2 counterparts, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and others are quite different. You'll defend the Iron Gator as Navy SEALs, aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier with an impressively detailed and expansive interior. The SEALs have no permanent spawn point, so it can get pretty intense. Meanwhile, the enemy can keep on flowing out of their shore base. Granted, it's tough to force your way aboard an aircraft carrier, but the enemy has boats, APCs, and jetskis to get them over, as well as several helicopters.

You'll find that the Special Forces maps have generally fewer jets, and tanks for that matter. I can understand why. It's nearly impossible to take down a jet, and tanks aren't far behind. If you aren't within spitting distance and carrying either a mine or a package of C4, infantry is toast. Grenades don't do it, shoulder-mounted rockets are slow and weak, and bullets will only scratch the paint. The average tank has so much armor, in fact, and the -mounted shoulder rocket launcher or RPG is so slow to reload and does so little damage, that it's possible for an engineer to repair a tank faster than it's getting damaged. Even a direct hit from an artillery strike won't do the job. You need high-grade explosives. As for jets… those are just a pain in the butt. I don't think I've ever actually downed one of those, and believe me, I've tried. You're better off using surface-to-air armaments as ground defense.

At any rate, I like the new maps. With a more concentrated battlefield, it's much more difficult for some power jerk to flank your forces and steal a spawn point way in the back. On some maps, you'll be faced with quite a gauntlet if you try that. The four-wheeler allows you to cross lots of space in short amount of time, and it's less noticeable than the buggy, but it also leaves you quite vulnerable and doesn't take much damage. New vehicles also include the technical (a pickup truck with a machine gun mounted on the bed), a six-wheeled buggy with multiple gun turrets, some new helicopters, and another APC, this one with a tank cannon. However, the turret has very limited vertical movement (as a tradeoff for its power). I prefer the original APC because a passenger can see out the windows and shoot at people. In the new one, I feel like a guy in a barrel tumbling down a hill, unless I'm driving, that is.

Visually, the game is pretty much the same as BF2, which isn't bad at all. If you have the horsepower, it's pretty easy on the eyes. One of our test rigs has a 7800GTX, so we kinda decided to go with that. The videos we took today were all recorded from that rig, which is also equipped with a P4 3.4GHz, 2GB of PC3200 RAM, and a fat hard drive, among other niceties. 2 gigs of RAM doesn't appear to make much more difference than 1GB when it comes to load times, but the matches themselves will run a lot smoother.

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.