We’ll admit it… we’re excited right now. It’s hard not to be when the game that you’ve been anticipating for an absolute age (or at least, one of the games, given that the list is ridiculously long) finally comes out. And would you believe it, it’s not even a game made specifically for the 360. Despite our almost whorish leanings towards the console, we’ve been salivating over a game that plenty of current-gen types have been enjoying for months. Are we mad? Have we become total heathens? Thankfully, the answer to both is no… well, to the first question at least. Heresay is our middle name, after all.

You see, the absolute truth of the matter is that Battlefield is ‘freakin’ sweet’, as we believe the kids on the street say these days. It’s a far more deliberate, strategic and generally absorbing FPS than, say, Quake or Half-Life, purely because it’s grounded in some semblance of military realism and focuses heavily on teamwork and picking your spots – needless to say, running around spraying bullets everywhere tends to lead to many quick and painful deaths. Of course, the only real problem is that it’s specifically a multi-player game that’s meant to be played online by large teams of people; with the single-player side of things being nothing more than an AI-filled practice version of the multi-player game, those without online capabilities were left feeling a bit put out. Not so much of a problem for PC gamers considering most PCs are online, you might think, but when you’re bringing across the same game to a console where the number of people with online access is significantly smaller, it becomes quite a big worry...

But aye, there’s the rub – Battlefield 2: Modern Combat isn’t the same game. In fact, if you were to only play the offline single-player mode, you’d be hard pushed to see the similarities short of the abundance of guns and men shouting ‘We’re getting pinned down over here!’ before they get blown to kingdom come. Sensibly, EA realised that a multi-player-centric game on a console where not everyone had access to online play just wouldn’t work; enter, stage left, EA’s UK development studio to pick up the slack and create something that all gamers could enjoy. True, the actual Live multi-player side of Modern Combat is a far more accurate recreation of the Battlefield formula and that’s definitely a good thing, as it’s one of the most enjoyable online experiences we’ve had so far on our 360s – but then, that’s something to be left for next month’s comprehensive Community review. For now, let’s focus on the main meat of the game; a meat that, while great fun, is tougher than military shoe leather...

Not surprisingly, the major differences in Modern Combat’s single-player campaign arises from only having one person on the battlefield – namely, yourself – doing much of the fighting for whichever side you’re currently rooting for. That’s not to say that you’re on your own, of course; indeed, the only way you’re going to taste the sweet wine of victory is if you’re savvy enough to make the best use of your troops. Instead of issuing commands to them in a Ghost Recon way, though, the twist here is that you actually ARE all the troops, or at least you can be if the need takes you. You see, the invention of HotSwapping is a great and powerful thing – regardless of the numerous sequels and cash-ins EA is responsible for, never let it be said that it doesn’t have some good ideas too. Essentially, HotSwapping allows you to leap all over the battlefield with the touch of a button. Each soldier has a marker over their head to show exactly what role they play in the fight, which you can clearly see through the eyes of whichever one you’re currently controlling. Should the need to move into another body arise – your current soldier is low on health, you need a particular weapon or you need to get to a certain location as quickly as possible – you simply look towards the soldier you want to jump to until their marker lights up, hit the X button and… well, we’d say ‘woosh!’ but we wouldn’t want to be overdramatic. Although the blurred zooming effect that occurs each and every time you HotSwap does that well enough without us making it worse...

Despite looking more than a little flashy though, it’s this HotSwapping concept that adds a completely new strategic element to the Battlefield mix, turning it into something else. Offering set objectives rather than simple checkpoints to capture, the management of troops is paramount if you want to make it through each mission successfully – although your men look after themselves when not being possessed by you and take out more than their fair share of enemies to boot, you can’t just sit back and watch the battle unfold (unless you enjoy watching cut-scenes depicting failure over and over again, that is). Of course, the fact that much of the game is entirely objective-based – move here, attack there, defend the other – rather than being free-form does raise its own problems. Specifically, the game's scripting means that every mission plays out in pretty much the same way each time you play them. With enemies appearing in almost the same positions every time, you can work out the best position to be in at all times simply by replaying the mission again and again until you’ve committed it to memory… it’s like Rick Dangerous, but without the falling boulders and angry Aztecs. Not that you’ll be doing this because you want to – you’ll spend so much time pausing and restarting each mission that remembering where all the enemies are isn’t so much a choice as a requirement.

Yes, Modern Combat is hard. Frustratingly so at times. Strangely though, it’s not the limited numbers of troops that you receive per mission that’s the problem – we can appreciate such a restriction being there, not just as a gameplay mechanic but also because it’s a statement on how war isn’t just a matter of pouring in endless soldiers until you win (yes, George Bush – that means you). No, it’s more the fact that your men continually get themselves killed for no apparent reason that makes us sad; you’ll start on the battlefield with a cluster of men, spend five minutes shooting enemy troops and then find that you’re the only one left standing, even if you did an incredibly good job of decimating the opposition. It doesn’t take more than five minutes of play to work out that running at enemies head-on leads to an early grave… so why can’t the AI soldiers work that out too? And then there’s the complete lack of checkpoints that leave you repeating the same sections of missions successfully just to reach that one little bit that’s continually giving you grief, again allowing you to basically memorise every inch of the level up in order to get through in one piece. Just one checkpoint, placed even at a mid-point through each mission would have been more than welcome over the infuriating repetition that awaits all but the most patient of gamers. Obviously, success is more satisfying when you do finally reach the end of a mission, but considering that much of the game’s replay value hinges on going back to past missions to grab more stars, we’re guessing that sensation of never wanting to go back now that we’ve won probably isn’t what we should be feeling.

However, if all this negativity is the case (and, let’s face it, it seems like quite a lot), you have to ask… how is Modern Combat still fun to play? To be honest, we’re not entirely sure because there hasn’t been a game in recent times that’s brought forth such anger in us. Yet we keep going back for more – playing just one more mission and laughing with joy as we steal away a full ten stars, then swearing like a trooper when the next level robs several hours of our lives away from us. Maybe the question shouldn’t be whether we’re heathens for wanting to play a 360 version of an original Xbox game, but rather whether we’re becoming sadists in our old age, determined to make ourselves feel pain before the pleasure begins. So long as that doesn’t conjure up images of an old man in a rubber gimp suit, we suspect the answer might very well be yes...