If Battlefield 2: Modern Combat was already a great game on the “old” systems, you’d have to expect it to be great on the next-generation of consoles, and you’d be right.

In the beginning the gods at Dice gave us Battlefield 1942 and it was good. The combination of strategy and teamwork had not been done quite this way in a first-person shooting game ever before and an online fan base built around the game erupted quickly. Here was a PC shooter with online multiplayer which would knock Valve’s Counterstrike off its high horse and bring a new style of teamwork to the genre. To follow themselves up a few years later, Dice released Battlefield 2, a sequel which updated the game in every conceivable way. This was also a PC only release, however, and console gamers were left wondering what all the fuss was about. They had SOCOM, after all, so why would they need anything else?

Dice and EA showed them by releasing Battlefield 2: Modern Combat on the PS2 and XBOX. While not as graphically impressive as SOCOM, nor as real-world in its tactics, B2:MC aced SOCOM in the fun department in the minds of many gamers (although there is still a good degree of disagreement as to which game is better).



B2:MC on the current-gen consoles still enjoys a rather robust community of online players, largely due to the ranking system, clan support, and impressive 24 player online games. As Microsoft released the XBOX 360, however, it seemed the perfect platform for another update of the game and B2:MC for the 360 was born. With new maps, downloadable content, and the online support that only XBOX Live can offer (right now, anyway), the game was sure to be incredible.

Well, it is.

To be fair, Battlefield 2: Modern Combat for the 360 is really the exact same game that was released for the current-gens last year. Everything has a new coat of paint due to the 360’s spiffy graphics capabilities and there is some exclusive new content, but there’s nothing much here that we haven’t seen already.



Especially lackluster is the single player mode which is literally the exact same game as was released on the XBOX and PS2. The single player game is fun, and has enough of a reward system to warrant multiple playthroughs, but if you did it on one of the earlier systems, there’s not a lot of reason to do it again. The single player game got B2:MC some less than stellar reviews, particularly from publications that didn’t seem to appreciate the real reason for the game’s existence.

There are better one-player shooters out there, that’s for sure. But hotswapping aside (and that term still makes me titter like a schoolboy who just heard his first dirty joke), no one plays Battlefield for the single player game.

This is a game that is all about the online play, baby. And just as its current gen predecessor did, the 360 version of B2:MC handles online like nobody’s business. The medal and ranking system is intact and seems to function better than the earlier version’s (on the PS2, at least, Battlefield servers have a tendency to mysteriously wash away a player’s rank and medals for no apparent reason from time to time – they always come back, but some five star generals take offense to looking like a buck private all over again), and XBOX Live is, of course, unparalleled as an online community in a console environment.



There seem to be no lag issues (although this may be premature – I wrote the same thing in my review of the PS2 version, only to eat crow as server crashes and lag became a regular headache later on), and the 360 is more than capable of keeping everything moving at an impressive frame rate.

So, it may be the same game as before, more or less, but in a prettier package and with a few more bells and whistles, but for my money (or, more accurately, yours) there is nothing wrong with taking a great game and making it available to those with the scrilla for Microsoft’s costly new toy. After all, if you’re old enough to remember the launch of CD’s, you didn’t refuse to buy the White Album or Dark Side of the Moon because there was nothing new along with the better technology, right? There is no reason to refuse this upgrade either. It also serves for me as a glimmer of hope for the inevitable PS3 version and the probability of a console-based, next-gen Battlefield 3.

It is a great time to be a gamer.


Review by Michael Triggs.