Battlefield Vietnam Review

Thanks to the efforts of Electronic Arts and DICE, one of the nastiest conflicts to go down in recent history has now been totally re-enacted in an online format to offer fun for the whole family. Battlefield: Vietnam offers players the chance to hop online as either the American or Vietcong forces in an assortment of separate skirmishes encompassing the Vietnam conflict.

New vehicles are another thing fans of the original Battlefield 1942 can look forward to seeing more of in BFV. While the standard tanks, jeeps, APCs, and planes are all still in the game (as different vehicles, of course - Vietnam was a slightly different timeframe from WW2), there are also a number of new toys to play with. One of the coolest new additions are definitely the choppers. Fans of the "Desert Combat" mod from Battlefield 1942 will instantly be familiar with these things, and will also be relieved to know that they've been refined and are now much easier to fly, thanks to the combined efforts of DICE and the DC mod team.

Choppers typically have space to accommodate several passengers, a number of primary and secondary weapons, and some even have an awesome "tow cable" that can be dropped to pick up other vehicles and deliver them to specific areas, including tanks, boats, and other things. Some levels even have supply crates, which will rearm and heal up any soldier that gets nearby - these crates can be airlifted to any location on the map for the ultimate team-bolstering experience. While choppers are still quite difficult for new players to get accommodated with (and even I am still grappling with trying to execute that "perfect landing"), the controls are very intuitive and simple to grasp, making these aircraft a very awesome addition to the game.

And of course, no review of BFV would be complete without a brief mention of the fighter jets, some of which haul around hefty amounts of napalm for those times when you just want to massacre every living thing inside of a specific sector. The ground vehicles in particular are also all backed up by some excellent physics detail, so seeing them roll over the terrain is a real treat.

The maps in Battlefield Vietnam are limited in selection (compared to the original), but offer a lot of content. Each map is rife with vehicles and spawn points, but the terrain itself is particularly impressive. Many graphical tricks have been pulled to give the game a huge sense of scale without requiring players to spend an hour trying to get somewhere, and wading through the thick grass and heavy jungle while keeping a constant eye open for an ambush is a tense and very immersive experience.

The level design itself varies from mission to mission, with some levels involving an air-supported water assault from a distant island, or others that take place in heavy urban environments, where a bazooka-wielding crazyman can come running out from any corner, ready to ruin your day. Unfortunately, I noticed a suspicious lack of mounted guns to man on these levels - the only available turrets were artillery pieces that favored the defending team in certain levels. Sandbags and bunkers are still readily available around most bases however, ensuring there's always a place to hide.

But let's move on to the most important aspect of Battlefield Vietnam: the online performance. While the game has some limited LAN and offline playability (yay for bots), the REAL meat involves getting online and mixing it up with some bad guys. Playing BFV online is definitely a great experience (it's nice to get online and away from the tree-hugging bots), though it can obviously be marred by inexperienced and/or moronic players. Since that isn't an issue that can really be affected by the developers (aside from offering a thorough built-in tutorial, which BFV lacks), I'll focus on commenting more on the technical side of things.

While the game ran solidly enough online, there are a number of nagging issues which bog the fun level down by quite a bit. While some of my experiences were very solid, others ran into quite a few latency issues that resulted in jumpiness galore for all involved - trying to fly a chopper that is teleporting around the level completely at random is one hell of a challenge. This may just be a side effect of the game being fairly new and players with truly uber bandwidth not having enough time to set up their servers yet, but it may also be a secondary issue given the number of other reports I've seen. In any case, the networking code seems to be at least as stable as Battlefield 1942 aside from these few nagging issues, so things are quite playable right now, and future patches will most likely iron out the remaining complaints.

The graphics engine is both one of the strongest and one of the weakest aspects to Battlefield Vietnam. The presentation is beautiful, and the art direction is fantastic - I already mentioned above how truly nice the maps and various objects look, but they really need to be seen up close to make out the nice little details. The view distance allows players to see far-off mountains with ease, making for a great jungle romp experience. The game also has support for a decent variety of resolutions and detail settings, so finding something suitable to your specific system should not be a problem. After playing for an extensive period of time, however, I started to notice some really annoying problems with the rendering engine. Heading the list is the fact that Battlefield Vietnam really, really sucks at handling indoor areas. While there are numerous buildings to take cover in, even getting up close to these structures caused these framerates to drop into a stuttery mess (I run an XP2500+ with a Radeon 9600 Pro). The game also apparently doesn't get along very nicely with any driver-side FSAA settings that might be enabled, and even anisotropic filtering can cause a huge graphical mess to occur in places.

On top of all that, the game felt like a huge memory hog, with level load times exceeding the one minute mark (I sometimes counted close to two), and the game turned into a hard-drive-paging slideshow if I had the texture detail and overall graphical quality turned up to maximum. Quitting out is even more annoying, as the game takes a good 30-40 seconds to remove itself from my screen due to the extensive unload time. This might jut be a result of my slightly bloated operating environment, but I have at least 512MB worth of a decent pair of RAM sticks, and have never noticed a loading problem this excessive in other games. Make sure you've either got bucketloads of RAM, a really clean OS install, or just huge amounts of patience before trying to tackle this title.

The audio engine is, unfortunately, also a little buggy. Enabling hardware acceleration has a tendency to warp the audio for certain players, and ruin the framerates of others. There are also some odd times where certain effects, like weapon noises will be incredibly quiet, even if someone sticks a gun to the character's face and pulls the trigger. News has it that, again, a patch is in the works to try and fix this, but it appears that an unreliable testing process (or a rushed release - most likely the latter) is to blame for a quirky product once again. What parts of the audio do function properly work great, however, and there's some really nice ambience when you're sneaking through a war zone with artillery and bullets flying around everywhere.