Many subtle improvements have been made to the game over BF 1942. Your weapon remains available in many of Battlefield Vietnam's vehicles, which can make being a passenger a lot more fun. The command point capture timer is more sophisticated, allowing a group of soldiers to capture a command point more quickly than a lone wolf. VC engineers can move special tunnel entrance spawn points around the map, making for some great covert strategy gameplay.
To top it all off, there is a (beta) map editor and mod kit included.
What's Old
If your Internet connection goes down one day and you decide to try single-player mode, you'll discover the same weak (often downright bewildered) AI used in BF 1942. Battlefield Vietnam doesn't even pretend to offer a compelling single-player campaign, so if you're not into online play, pass on this one.
Despite the beefy new graphics, fog is still used in abundance to limit your viewing distance. It's a small annoyance, but you really notice it after playing games with minimal or no fog, especially when flying.
Joystick support remains at an absolute minimum. At the very least I would have expected separate options for planes and helicopters, but no such luck. I'm aware that a lot of people don't use joysticks, and employ no controllers other than mouse and keyboard, yet in game with air vehicles as a central feature, there is really no excuse for such poor controller support.
Maps are quite well thought out and present some interesting scenarios, all modeled loosely on battles that took place during the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, you can still fly across them in less than 30 seconds in a jet, so the familiar "out of bounds" warning is never far off. The slower moving choppers are better suited to maps this size.
The Bottom Line
I don't know if it's the appeal of Vietnam era or what, but gamers certainly haven't waited for the reviews to come out before running to the store and buying Battlefield Vietnam. Two weeks after its release it already has more players that BF 1942 and enough servers to make the in-game browser slightly dysfunctional.
What is here will be excellent in a patch or two. I'm slightly disappointed by what isn't here. For an entirely new game Battlefield Vietnam doesn't really try to do anything new. Surely FPS developers haven't completely exhausted the possibilities when it comes to things like multiplayer game modes? Some games have had integrated voice communication for a long time now, and given that Unreal Tournament 2004 has it, it doesn't seem like too much to ask. How about a favorites list and a buddy tracker in the server browser? I know we have the technology.
Minor omissions aside, Battlefield Vietnam does excel in the only area that really counts - it's undeniably fun. Whether you're spraying an enemy base with machine gun fire from the back of a chopper or sneaking around in the brush with your sniper rifle, the excitement is relentless. Not even the impending release of Doom 3 will keep people out of this jungle.
