In addition the three new maps the booster pack adds two new types of vehicles, a ground attack fighter and a scout helicopter. The ground attack fighter (for the US it’s an A-10 Warthog, one of my all time favorite aircraft) is useful for taking out tanks and basically acting as a fast moving artillery strike. It comes with four powerful bombs as well as a a powerful gun. The scout choppers bring a little more strategy to the game as they provide mobile radar for your team. This is helpful as it allows for an extra way to find attackers and can help make up for a crappy commander. The choppers also have a vicious mini gun which can rend flesh and armor in seconds. Two new forms of aircraft are a nice addition if you’re a good flier but if you are strictly a ground pounder like I am they just add another level of difficulty to the game. I understand that the two new aircraft are a way to balance out the addition of so many tanks to the game but it further frustrates me as there is really no good balance to the aircraft. Sure you have a few SAM sites sitting around the map but good pilots know where they are and will take you out before you get a chance to take them out. To me the game desperately needs a stinger missile class or some other way to effectively take down planes and helicopters.
With all things Battlefield you have to take the good with the bad. The good is usually the excellent game play and team work and the bad is usually the number of bugs that are in the software. In this case you have to take the three new decent maps with the 1.3 patch that came out to support it. The 1.3 patch introduces some cool new features (like the ability for commanders to drop vehicles in an area) but it also introduced a ton of bugs. Since I’ve upgraded to the patch I’ve had more crash to desktops than I’ve had with any other game and the frustrating thing is that the game doesn’t crash until it finished loading a map. Given that it takes three to five minutes to get into the game, find a server, and load a map we are talking about a lot of wasted time with nothing to show for it.
The real measure of any expansion or booster pack for a game like Battlefield 2 is how many other people download and play it because you really can’t play a game like this without a lot of other people. While it doesn’t seem like there are a lot of servers out there with the maps on them I was usually able to find one to three servers that were running the booster pack. Certainly not as many as who were running the original maps but there were only a few occasions when I couldn’t find a server to play on.
While it’s not perfect the booster pack has re-kindled my Battlefield 2 passion again. While I’m not the biggest fan of Midnight Sun both Operation Harvest and Road Rage manage to have that certain Battlefield feel where you can have intense battles for one flag that are part of a much larger conflict for the rest of the map. $10 does seem just a little high for the expansion pack (especially if you’re a ground pounder like me) but it’s not too steep of a price compared to what people are shelling out for new Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter content.
B-
While there isn't a Karkland or Wake Island classic map in the mix, two of the three maps are actually pretty solid and feature some strong game play if you can get the game to run,
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