Battlefield 2: Modern Combat Xbox 360

6.0

By Yahoo! Shopping User  Oct 25, 2006

Pros: Hotswapping adds a fun dynamic to the gameplay; lots of vehicles and weapons to play around with; varied campaign; 24 player online multiplayer.

Cons: Arcadey, shooting gallery-like feel; vehicles don't control well; friendly artificial intelligence isn't so great.

Underneath its shiny new coat of paint, Modern Combat for the Xbox 360 is still basically the same, solid team-based shooter that was released last year on the Xbox and PlayStation 2. It seems a little strange that Battlefield 2: Modern Combat shoul...d have the "2" in the title, given that this is the first Battlefield game to make an appearance on consoles. The game also, unfortunately, bears little resemblance to its superb namesake on the PC. While Modern Combat does offer some amount of charm with its highly produced interludes and its slick unit-switching mechanism, ultimately this multiplayer-focused military shooter falls short of its promise with design flaws in its campaign and clunky vehicle handling. The obvious graphical enhancements for the Xbox 360 do add something to the overall package, though. The presentation is where Modern Combat has received the greatest attention in its transition from the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox to the Xbox 360. Character models and vehicles exhibit a great amount of detail, with full shadows and much sharper texturing all around. Other nice details include persistent bullet-hole decals and spent cartridges. If you man a stationary machine gun for a while, you can look down and see quite a pile of brass building up at your feet. The environments can look a little sterile at times, though, and many of the buildings on a single-player map still can't be explored. However, vehicle explosions are much more satisfying now, with fire and smoke effects, as well as large chunks of metal that break off and disappear later via secondary explosions. The weapon sounds seem about the same as the other versions of Modern Combat, which is to say, decent but not totally remarkable. There is quite a bit of radio chatter during battle, too, but it still tends to get very repetitive, and the voice acting for the Chinese side might be a shade offensive, as most of it is delivered in English with a thick, Charlie Chan-style accent. Read more Less