Friday, June 9, 2006


Bought the Armored Fury booster pack for BF2. $10 may seem too steep for a mere 3 maps at first, but the maps are really fun. None of them come close to Karkand/Sharqi quality combat though. Many of the previews for Armored Fury had the designer stating infantry combat was much more well balanced into the pack, but this simply isn't true. Most of the battles are centered around tank combat, and the "Armored Fury" part of the title is very apt. The most popular infantry class on these maps is the Anti-Tank kit, as there's few opportunities for the other kits to shine in. Karkand and Sharqi have plenty of areas where infantry can hide from vehicles, and these areas stretch across the bulk of those maps. But in Armored Fury, most of the flag areas are separated by long empty areas. These areas are usually full of tanks, and it's not that easy to bypass these tanks with another vehicle besides a tank of your own. Once you do arrive at a flag area, most enemy tanks will be assisted by their team's UAV. This makes it very difficult to destroy the tanks with Anti-Tank or C4 attacks.

So yeah.. infantry, which to me (and probably most BF2 players) should be the game's focus, is very much set in a supporting role with this booster. Much of this could be rectified if EA released a patch for the booster that removed, say, half of the available tanks on each of the maps.

I think one way to counteract the effectiveness of the tanks at the flag areas is to make sure the enemy UAV is kept destroyed as often as possible. This is mostly easily accomplished with the use of the new scout helicopters and Spec Ops troops. Right now, due to the position of the UAV trailers (deep within enemy territory, surrounded by tanks), enemy UAV trailers are rarely destroyed. If you fly a scout chopper, I encourage you to do as many commando raids on UAVs as possible, and not just focus on the highly entertaining act of machine gunning the crap out of fleeing infantry ;-)

My final complaint with the booster is that all of the original jets are absent! D'oh! Flying jets is one of my fav things to do in BF2, so their absence in the booster is quite painful. This "booster" is supposed to expand the game, not shrink it. Boo!

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