Flaws

Battlefield Vietnam is far from perfect. There are several obvious criticisms we can level at it - namely, it's not all that different than the original, nor is it markedly better than Desert Combat. Technical improvements aside, the only addition to Vietnam that isn't present in 1942 or its mods is that of homing missiles. However, thanks to the game's lower price (around $35USD) and the golden rule of "if it's not broken, don't fix it", this can be somewhat excused.

Still, there is something clearly lacking in Battlefield Vietnam. It's not the production values, which are stellar - in fact EA licensed many songs identified with the war, and these can be played in helicopters. It's not even the graphics; I'm perfectly happy with lower detail in exchange for better performance and huge maps. It's just that there's a general feeling that this game could be better, somehow. There are a few easily-patchable specific problems we can name, but Battlefield Vietnam clearly lacks the wow factor of its predecessor. This game just isn't as great an improvement on the original as Baldur's Gate II or FreeSpace 2 were.

There are more acute and inexcusable problems, however. First and foremost among the list have to be the bugs and performance issues the game has. It's remarkable, but EA and DICE really haven't learned their lesson after the Battlefield 1942 launch. Although the problems aren't as severe, they're obvious enough that we have little doubt that EA actively chose to release the game in this state.

The most obvious issue is the lag. In the days I've been playing online, I have yet to encounter a server that won't stutter and warp my character around consistently. While it may not happen all the time, it will occur at least once every few minutes, particularly at a busy spawn point or in a fight. Most servers, even some of the official EA ones, have constant lag problems. This is despite trying all four connection settings (56K, ISDN, ADSL and LAN speeds) and the comments on servers and message boards clearly show I am not the only one with lag issues.


Then we're bewildered by some of the bugs and "features" of the interface. The icon to enable Punkbuster is all but invisible, at least on this reviewer's screen. It took random clicking around the "Enable" text to find said button. Even worse - and this has been independently verified - the server browser can't sort servers. Want to re-arrange the list by ping? Good luck, you can click the sort button all day without any effect. Not that we'd trust the pings reported by the browser in the first place. What seems like a steady 120ms ping can be 250 once you get in game, or stay as 120ms but be quite choppy due to erratic packet delivery. And don't even get me started on the load times.

Finally, there are some game design problems that should be addressed. The default control setup remains quite odd - just who uses K and L to for chat? The voice commands are unclear and constantly spammed; we wish for more effective flood controls. Even with team damage off, griefers have far too easy a time disrupting the team and while players have numbers assigned, it seems like no one seems to know how to vote. Class balance is yet another problem, neatly summed up by Tycho from Penny Arcade, "Between your disposable rocket launcher and your heavy machinegun, you represent a buffet of death that is open twenty-four hours a day", who is talking about the US GI who wields both the M60 machine gun and LAW rocket launcher.

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