As in Battlefield 2, though, there's a way to take an enemy commander's tools away from him. There's also an EMP strike, which calls down an electromagnetic burst that temporarily knocks out enemy vehicles in the blast radius. Now, you'll hear the thuds of the orbital bombardment within seconds of calling it in. In fact, the old days of having to call in artillery and then wait 15 seconds for it to arrive are gone. There's a supply drop, a satellite scan that tells you the location of every detectable enemy on the map, a UAV button that puts a drone temporarily over an area of the battlefield, and an orbital strike option that works like artillery but is a lot more responsive. The commander tools in Battlefield 2142 are fairly similar to those found in Battlefield 2. Commanders are team leaders and as such are able to issue orders to squad leaders, as well as make use of a number of tools. We were also able to toy around with the commander functions. If you're wounded, teammates are usually good about taking out the med kit and healing you, and if you're 'killed,' they're also good about getting the old defibrillator paddles out and shocking you back to life, which is helpful. Your squad will come and help cover you while the enemy flag slowly comes down the flagpole and your team's flag goes up it. This is especially true if you're capturing an outpost. The AI does seem to work better in a squad, since squadmates have a tendency to stick together and support one another. The AI in previous Battlefield games has been everywhere from brain-dead to merely decent, and judging from our teammates' behavior in Battlefield 2142, it looks like the AI is a bit sharper than before, though you won't mistake them for real human beings. Though Battlefield 2142 is primarily a multiplayer game, you can still play alongside the AI in a single-player mode.

We played on the latter to see how smart these bots are. Speaking of which, you have some control over the AI's behavior, as well-a sliding bar lets you adjust their difficulty from easy to hard. We suspect that it might have something to do with processing issues, since having the computer control and keep track of more characters might affect the performance of the AI. That's right-it appears that single-player is still limited to 16 players and the 16-player maps. Actually, we were also playing alongside the AI bots, as the computer controls 15 of the 16 players in single-player. We were able to play in single-player against the artificial intelligence. With Battlefield 2142 scheduled to arrive later this month, we got some last hands-on time with a nearly finished version of the game recently to see how well everything has come together. In Battlefield 2142, you'll be able to participate in that war in multiplayer battles of up to 64 players, representing either the European Union or the Russian-centered Pan Asian Coalition. Unfortunately, most of the world's land is in the Northern Hemisphere, so war erupts between futuristic factions for the last remaining land on Earth. As the next game in the acclaimed Battlefield saga, 2142 takes place approximately 150 years in the future, after a new ice age makes most of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable. The Cold War may be history, but EA and developer DICE have a new cold war up their sleeves in Battlefield 2142.

Battlefield 3 bots mod