It seems kind of wrong to be talking about games on a day like today, but I’m going to anyway.

Battlefield 2 really is a fantastic game. Yes, it’s got bugs that should have been quashed before release (here’s hoping they’ll actually be fixed this time) and yes I keep telling myself that I’m never going to buy another EA game, but the Battlefield series has always been something pretty special. Battlefield Vietnam was something of a non-event for me, being too obviously rushed to even bother with and not really doing anything to drag me away from the great pedigree of its prequel. As my brother pointed out when my copy of BF2 came this morning, I’m likely to return to the winter of 2003 with its 14-hour BF1942 and Desert Combat sessions.

I was impressed with how it runs on my system which is starting to show its age (Pentium 4 2.4GHz, 1GB RAM, 9700 Pro), where I can run it very comfortably at 1024×768 with medium/high settings. I haven’t been hugely impressed by graphics in a long time but when I climbed to the brow of a hill on the dam level I was blown away by the amount of detail stretching out into the distance. This must really be a graphical treat on a more modern rig.

Gameplay is vintage Battlefield (fun as hell if you haven’t played it) but with more features to encourage teamplay which is where much of the best stuff comes from. Taking a town with your team of 32, working street-by-street, with medics healing people and machine gunners providing suppressing fire while everyone sprints to cover from the enemy tank just can’t be beaten. The addition of the RTS-style commander mode where you can provide supply drops and artillery bombardments for your team is fun, but not as good as your regular Battlefield-ing.

It could probably do with a few more maps and needs some patching beyond that useless 1.01 release, but I think I’ve found the game to spend my free summer playing.