Commander mode & Conclusion

Commander mode is evolutionary and revolutionary at the same moment. It all depends on whether or not your team wants to co-operate. For clans, it's going to be absolutely huge. A player is elected commander and then has access, through the Caps Lock button, to a zoomable map of the battlefield with real-time enemy and player dispositions. He can give commands to squads, deploy a UAV to scan an area, use a once-over scan, fire artillery or drop supplies. Between two teams, it doesn't matter who has the best players any longer, but who has their players organized on squads. Once squads are in, commanders usually make the difference.

Depending on the number of players in the game, a commander might be best off constantly in commander view rather than actively fighting. If you've ever played Microsoft's old MMO, Allegiance, you've got a pretty good idea how important solid leadership is. Commanders also have to communicate to their team in ways other than mere orders and objectives, they also need to inform them when artillery needs repairs or what kind of kits are best suited to a squad. The built-in voice comms are limited to those only in your squad, which is OK sometimes and it isn't at others. It'd be better if there was a key for global chat, with squad chat being default, but this is acceptable.

Conclusion

Quite honestly, this is a very thorough demo that gives a really solid taste of what the final game will probably be like. It's a huge download, and to make things worse it's a one-way ticket to the "4AM crap I go to work in 3 hours" redeye, but it's absolutely worth it. Despite the hassles for computer users who will doubtless have to fiddle with different driver versions to get the game working, once it is running smoothly, the past troubles are soon forgotten. At least, they will be once you venture into your \\Program Files\\EA GAMES\\Battlefield 2 Demo\\mods\\bf2\\Movies folder and delete all files except menu.bik, menu_loggedin.bik and noise.bik. Funny how much the removal of non-skippable splash screens makes the loading time so much quicker and more enjoyable, isn't it, EA?

Judging by the demo, Battlefield 2 looks like a true successor to Battlefield 1942. It has the same core gameplay, fixes up most of what was wrong with the original, and adds new features that really help flesh things out. The ultimate success of commander mode depends on who you're going to be playing with, but we have hope - it isn't that complicated a concept. Mostly the challenge lies in convincing people that being in a squad is more fun than lonewolfing.

Worth the download? Definitely. Just make sure to have at least 1GB of RAM.