In the days before this review was written I was almost positive that I was going to award Battlefield 2: Modern Combat with a despicable two out of five rating and for excellent reason. Electronic Arts' and Dice's enjoyable multiplayer blast fest was crapping out in its most entertaining area, that being online play. For days the game crashed, leading to more reboots than I care to remember, and the best part is I wasn't alone. The first thing out of people's mouths wasn't "I'm going to kick your ass" or "I call dibs on the chopper", but rather, "Is anyone else crashing"? Thankfully, EA or Microsoft resolved the issue with a content download and I was able to actually reward the developers' efforts with a well deserved final score. Even with its quirks Modern Combat is a hell of a good time.

Just like its PC big daddy poppa (which is infinitely superior), Battlefield 2: Modern Combat drops you into a virtual playground and charges you with killing the bad guys, whether they be American, Chinese, European, or Middle Eastern, except unlike competing games of this type, you have an insane amount of options at your itchy trigger fingers. Not only can you traverse the game's enormous environments on foot, but you can also hop into the driver's seat of well over 30 vehicles that include cars, jeeps, tanks, boats, and helicopters. But what's even tastier is the ability to actually ride in them and let the pilot drop you off, either by landing in a safe location or allowing you to parachute out. Of course, many of the online pilots that you'll encounter don't have a damn clue what their doing, so expect them to crash at any moment. That's why this game, more than any, is best played with trustworthy friends.

Before you're plunged into a battle you'll need to pledge your allegiance to one of the aforementioned sides, each of which has five troop types (assault, sniper, special ops, engineer, and support) that carry signature weapons and equipment. So unlike games such as Halo 2 and Doom 3, you can't actually pick up the weapons of the deceased. It's definitely unrealistic, but given the many options one can choose, it's not a big deal.