I’ve been playing Battlefield 2 (plus demo) for nearly a month now. My gameplay has markedly improved since the first time I stumbled into the combat zone as a target dummy for many an enemy. I’ve honed my skills to where I can at least hold my own, and often give better than I get. I do not have a military background, although I’ve watched enough war movies, read enough history books, played enough First Person Shooters and have enough common sense to know what does and does not work on the digital battlefield. In a word, I know what I’m doing out there. The question is, does everybody else? Does real combat involve stealing a teammate’s tank, flying helicopters upside down, and telling your squad leader to sod off when he is trying to get some help from you? I sincerely doubt it!

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My favorite position. Looking for enemies who dare step foot on the street!

Battlefield 2 works best, and is arguably the most fun, when you are playing in squads as part of a larger team. The overall commander of your team issues orders to the various squad leaders, and your squad leader will then issue orders to you. When this is a working relationship, the game illustrates some of the finest teamwork in a modern combat simulation you will see on a computer screen. However, unless you play on a server with a good group of squad mates who share your same philosophy, you may quickly find yourself operating alone, without support, without friends, and without purpose. For me, I seem to have the misfortune to find the latter more than the former these days (even on ranked servers where realism comes at a premium).

Case in point. I can’t tell you how many times I will form a squad, have three or four other guys join me, only to check my map in a few minutes and see my people spread willy nilly across the map – far from the point they are supposed to be attacking! Not only does this make issuing cohesive orders difficult (you can only issue attack coordinates one at a time), but it makes teamwork absolutely impossible. Similarly, I will often join squads, track down the leader only to find him running in circles, hiding in a dumpster, seldom or never issuing orders and seemingly playing a different game than the rest of us. This begs the questions of why join a squad at all, or why create a squad at all? In my experience, on ranked servers no less, teamwork is great in theory, but seldom put effectively into practice.

Resist the urge to drive this vehicle on suicide missions! Especially when we are on board with you!

Even when squads are working as a finely tuned machine (which is a thing of beauty!), there are always other teammates ready to rain frustration upon you. Take driving for instance. Driving should be a fairly straightforward excercise for most people, and in BF2 we can think of driving transport vehicles much like driving a cab. You pick up, you drop off. But wait, you are in a battlezone – so maybe we should refine our rules a bit. You pick up certainly, you drive your troops TO the hot zone, but not INTO the hot zone (seems obvious to me). While certainly not as bad as driving a gasoline tanker into battle, I can tell you that nine times out of ten if you drive an APC full of troops right up next to the enemy anti-tank guns – you can count on every allied soldier getting killed. Unfortunately this happens more than I care to think about…and I have learned to bail LONG before any APC reaches live ordnance. On the flip side, how many times have you seen ONE soldier drive away in an APC while the rest of your team stands in the base checking their watches because they now have no transport?

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