Imagine a first person shooter with a scoring system like Tony Hawk or Project Gotham Racing that awards you points based on skill and style; where the efficiency and speed in which you take down opponents influences your final grade for that particular "mission". Battlefield 2: Modern Combat, the PlayStation 2 and Xbox translation of the popular PC title, looks to do just that. It is a squad based first person shooter that rewards you as a leader based on how well you take advantage of your team, and from what we've seen so far it looks like it's quite the exciting twist.

Battlefield 2: Modern Combat grants you points as you kill your enemies. The more frequently you kill them , the higher a multiplier bar raises. So, keep the killings going and you'll always have a healthy multiplier bar. This is good, as at the end of each level, the points you earn from your mission are tallied and used to purchase upgrades for your character such as weapons, armor, etc. It also influences your overall rank in the game, making your skills and abilities much more streamlined and effective as the game (and your character) progresses.

Now, while Battlefield 2: Modern Combat is a squad-based game, it's not really a squad-based game. Confused? Well, it goes like this: you are given control of a squad that is pretty much autonomous, and rather than issue them commands such as "go there" and "shoot him", you have the ability to "Hot Swap" from teammate to teammate. The hot swap, admittedly, is a cool looking effect that allows you to switch perspective from one squad member to another, as long as they are in your line of sight. So, for example, say you need to acquire a strategic position from a bombed out building window to snipe from. You take control of one of your squad, march them up all of those damn stairs until they arrive at an advantageous position from which to rain precise death down on the opposing force. But ho! What's this? They need someone to help out back on the ground? Well, never fear, as the Hot Swap comes to the rescue; you simply look at your fellow team member and your perspective is almost instantly transported from the sniper in the window to the soldier on the ground.

It's a device that proposes a lot of interesting gameplay elements, especially for a squad-based first person shooter. While your team can take care of themselves, you only receive points and skills based on the enemies and objectives you complete yourself, so the incentive is to make sure you are always right where the action is. Some might see this as a pretty big stretch from the multiplayer-centric design of the first incarnations of the Battlefield series on the PC, but never fear! Multiplayer will be in Battlefield 2: Modern Combat as well, in the form of 24 player skirmishes across an initial 12 battle maps.