

The assault class is your basic grunt, with an assault rifle, grenades, a grenade launcher, and a pistol. Each soldier class has a unique set of weapons and tools, and you can change your class each time you spawn. The demo we played had assault, sniper, special ops, engineer, and support classes to choose from. When you start a match, you can choose what type of soldier you want to be and which control point on the map you want to spawn at. The game allows for 24-player online matches, with a manageable 12 players per team. You'll be able to take the controls of over 30 different vehicles in Modern Combat. This gameplay should be instantly familiar to anyone who played the PC Battlefield games, and in a good contest, the push and pull of the action as your team takes and loses flags makes for some exciting and frantic gameplay. When one of the team's tickets count reaches zero, the round is over. Whenever you control more flags than your opponent, their tickets start to count down. You're given a choice to join the Middle Eastern Coalition or the US team, which both start the match with about 450 tickets.


As in the PC version of the game, here conquest mode involves securing a number of checkpoints-represented as flags-on the map. The demo we played let us jump into a conquest game on a Middle Eastern-themed map known as Backstab. We spent some time playing both the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions of the game online, and it looks like it's shaping up to be a solid representation of the tactical and chaotic action of its PC counterpart. We recently got our hands on a multiplayer demo of EA Games' upcoming console shooter, Battlefield 2: Modern Combat.
