Battlefield 2: Special Forces review

Special Forces is an expansion pack for last year's FPS wargame from EA/DICE, Battlefield 2. This expansion adds 8 new multiplayer maps and 6 new squads. You can choose to play as the British SAS, the US Navy SEALS ,the Russian Spetsnaz, the Middle Eastern Coalition, insurgents and rebels.

The new arenas are mostly dense urban maps and there's a selection of new items and vehicles. Digital Images and EA are trying to extend the life of their shooter but are a few Special Forces and maps enough to get more people buying the original?

Feeling Special

The new Special Forces are differentiated from the original forces by new skins, voice overs and a few new items. The forces are voiced in the language of their origin and this sounds pretty good. The British have the right accents and slang and the Russians sound like they're talking backwards so that's probably authentic too. The new characters don't really feel different from the old ones they just look and sound a bit different. The new items include night vision goggles and a gas mask. flashbang grenades and gas grenades are more common which can be particularly effective with the masks.

The effect of the flashbangs is amplified by night vision goggles and the gas grenades will force your opponent to remove their night vision goggles to put on their gas mask or give away their position by coughing. There are a couple of new items for some of the character classes to help them with buildings. You will now have a grappling hook or a zipline available. The grappling hook can be used to scale most buildings and the zipline is a crossbow that you can fire from height to street level and slide down.

Driving Miss Daisy

The other new addition in Special Forces is in the vehicle department. The tanks and pickup trucks are well armoured. The pickup has a fixed gun position at the back and can carry other soldiers. The tank can carry plenty of people and is virtually indestructible. This leads to the first problem with Special Forces which is in the game balance.

There are some vehicles like the tanks and planes that are more or less impossible to destroy and are naturally pretty powerful. There are more minor vehicles like the buggy and the jet ski which are fast and poorly armoured. These are great for getting around but you need to take care that you're not protected like you are in the tanks.

What's the Story

Special Forces make no pretensions about its single player mode, it's a token gesture. This is a multiplayer game and there's no attempt to create any kind of story or progression through the 8 new maps. You can play them on your own with computer controlled enemies and allies but that's just a poor mans multiplayer when you get down to it.

The in game server browser uses Gamespy and doesn't seem to work very well. I repeatedly couldn't find games using the in game browser that I could find when I ran the Gamespy application directly. I also found that the filters didn't work terribly well often requiring a complete restart to be applied properly. Once you do find a good server with a good lag and plenty of players there's lots of fun to be had.

These Things Take Time

Unfortunately, but perhaps not unexpectedly, the server browser isn't the only bug in the system. It can take a lot of time to get the game up and running with crashes to the desktop and getting dropped out of games. On one occasion it took me nearly 2 hours to complete 20 minutes of playing by the time I'd been able to actually get the game going. There's also the loading time to discuss, I don't see why it should take these maps so long to load. They aren't massive but it still takes a minute or two to get the level up and going.

If you dare to alter the display settings even slightly then you'll find that the load time more than doubles as all of the shaders are recompiled and the display is updated. I also found that these display optimisations took place even when I hadn't actually changed anything. Maybe this is as fast as EA can make it but I suspect that maybe someone was really proud of their coding on the progress bar and wanted to make sure it stayed on screen as long as possible.

Playing the Game

Well, the user interface is buggy, the server finder is buggy, even downloading the game from EA directly is buggy. If you can go out and buy this expansion then do, you'll end up playing it sooner. Even if you have to go into town shopping with your girlfriend, who wants to try everything on, and have lunch. Anyway, once you've got it, installed, found a server and endured the loading time, the game begins and you'll be able to decide whether it was worth all the hassle.

Fortunately for EA and Digital Illusions they've done a pretty good job with the in game action. The characters are well animated, the new weapons look good, the voice acting for the computer characters bulking out your squad is good and the maps are enjoyable. It ticks all of the right boxes once you're able to play and that's what you'd expect from a Battlefield title. As it's an expansion pack you expect it to be at least as good as the game it's expanding and Special Forces doesn't disappoint on that score. The little item additions and new characters adds to the action although the imbalance in some of the vehicles does detract occasionally.

Where am I?

The 8 new maps are primarily what this expansion pack is about so are they worth it? Well, like everything else in this title there's good ones and the other ones. The night maps are great, making good use of the new items. There are a couple of odd maps as well though. In one, there's a massive rocket that some insurgents are trying to launch.

This provides lots of obvious vantage points and flanking opportunities which removes a lot of the skill in learning the maps. Another puts you protecting an aircraft carrier which is being attacked by rebels on jet skis which just seems a bit odd really. Oddities aside, there's no really bad maps. They're all well textured and look great with lots of fixed place weapons and dense buildings.

Special Expansion

Expanding a game tries to serve two purposes – keep existing gamers parting with their cash and try to bring new gamers into the fold. Special Forces only really achieves one of these goals. Nothing really has changed from the original game that anyone who wasn't interested won't be persuaded otherwise by the new features. There are also all of the various bugs throughout the system that are likely to put off a lot of fence sitters. For those who already own Battlefield 2 and have been enjoying it then there is much to recommend in Special Forces. The new maps nicely supplement the old ones and the expansion adds plenty of mileage for fans of the game.