gameSlave

BattleField Vietnam Review.

Gameplay

Ah gameplay, THE single most important factor in any game, it's the reason why people still play Counter-Strike after all these years, so you'd think developers would play test games to extremes to iron out any balance issues before releasing any online FPS game, perhaps most do, unfortunately the play testing that was done on bf:v appears to have been woefully inadequate.

Now, we all know that every game has a weapon that most people find to be too powerful, too fast or generally just too good, that gun usually gets the moniker of "n00b cannon", as beginners and players of little skill tend to gravitate towards to it.

Battlefield Vietnam is no different, the M60 is this games' weapon of choice for the player of limited ability. And to a lesser extend the RPD on the NVA side.

In the retail game, these two weapons were simply idiotic, to accurate, too fast and not enough kick. Thank fully, this has improved somewhat with the 1.01 patch. While you could almost snipe whilst running with the M60, now you probably can't hit the side of barn with your 2nd bullet if you're not crouching or prone, with such a big heavy weapon, this is probably much more realistic.

The M60 and RPD did have quite incredible firing rates, these too have been calmed right down to more beleivable levels. All in all, they seem much more balanced.

The other main balance issue with the retail game was that the same U.S. player class did actually carry a LAW rocket launcher to go with his M60, basically this class of soldier was probably more useful than a tank. Go figure. Again, this has been modified in 1.01, the LAW rocket launcher is now paired with an M14 rifle, and the M60 with a grenade launcher. This make much more sense and may actually make people use more than one class in game. A big improvement.

I still believe that these balance issues should not have escaped play testers.

On to aircraft, I have to admit that I've spent very little time in planes or helicopters, though in the case of planes, I spent most of that time turning to avoid flying off the edge of the maps, they are simply too small for jets. Period. I doubt the game could handle much larger maps due to it's high bandwidth requirements, which not suprisingly is my next issue.

Online play, the average 32 player server will require at least 2mbits and 4mbits for 64 players according to DICE/EA, this is a bit high when compared to virtually all other FPS games around.

This is another downer for bf:v, if renting servers is expensive, and it seems to be at present when compared to most other games, a clan community isn't going to flourish around your game.

Just how do these high bandwidth requirements manifest themselves in game? Well, the retail game was more of less unplayable with large numbers of clients, not ideal for a Battlefield series game. 1.01 is much better, noticeably so in most situations. It's now quite playable in all but the most hectic of firefights.

Local play, the offline play of Battlefield Vietnam is again plagued by the stupidity of the bots, this isn't a criticism of bf:v in particular, they aren't very good in bf:1942 either. However, offline play is only really of use to learn the maps, so I don't see this as a major problem.

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