Hands On with Battlefield 2

I got to play Battlefield 2 for the XBox today at E3. The demo I played was 30% finished. They had the basic functionality and multiplayer done, but are still working on the single player campaign. Battefield 2 is set in Kyrgyzstan and you play as either the Chinese or NATO. When I asked the head game producer about why he picked Kyrgyzstan, he said, “Because it has oil and stuff, is near China and has all the environments we need to make the game. It was not because it may be a hot spot in the near future.” The level I played was the a winter level set in a village. The graphics where okay, on par with a high end XBox game. The new innovation is the ability to hot swap between characters at the press of a button. The hot swap works this way: A white x appears above all of the friendly characters in your nearby area. If you press the x button on the XBox controller, you switch to the last character that you were looking at. It was fairly intuitive and it was fun switching from character to character and vehicle to vehicle. EA has fixed all the issues with flying helicopters and it was fun to fly around and blow up guys. Tank combat has been improved, but I felt it was a little over powered. Overall from what I saw of Battlefield 2 I loved it and can not wait to get my hands on a finished copy.

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