Nations at War! A Single Player / Co-op & Multiplayer Battlefield Style Game, You won't need BF2 to play it. Here's the long awaited public release of Nation at war which is standalone mod for battlefield 2, It Works without battlefield 2 installed, You'll need your battlefield 2 cd key in order to play the game. Nations at War was built upon the roots of a small group of friends, some of which have played together for many years. Nations at War is a team based First Person Shooter (FPS) that seamlessly combines the use of air, ground, and naval vehicles. It is set in the present day and uses modern and developing combat technologies in its arsenal of game play. Nations at War redefines first person shooter game play by depicting warfare between different nations and regions. Game play involves players joining a country or alliance.
This mod changes the whole concept of BF!
Nations at War Standalone is simply said, an appalling experience. This new build is the complete opposite of upgrading a project, it's simply insane to witness this happen to such a modification. Even so, I'm here to share my review.
Good Parts:
Locations – Folks who want to play basically nearly every single location in existence for Battlefield 2, this is your closest bet when it comes to a mass-scale number of maps in a single modification. However, quantity doesn’t mean quality. Nations at War although has an ample amount of locations, they have tons of issues. Some of them run horribly, some look atrocious, others straight up refuse to work and crash to the desktop. Visuals, balance, and many other things have issues in them.
Vehicles – Now one thing I can’t hate for sure are the provided vehicles. Although Frostbite assets are present in this mod, it still does feature some unique vehicles. For example: submarines, attack boats and so on. It's incredible to see something like this in a game like Battlefield 2, so that’s a huge thumbs up.
Factions – You have basically everyone from Vanilla and Special Forces Expansion, plus custom ones from other modifications, which is neat. Although I’m going to point out the disappointing fact that US and Russian teams use Battlefield 3 assets, leaving a weird impression of playing a knock-off Frostbite title, a typical thing found in asset-flip projects for Battlefield 2.
Bad Parts:
Armament – Nations at War instead of creating custom assets and improving upon original decided to go the route of using the same damn Frostbite assets that literally every copy-pasta modification uses. Not only that however, it doubles down on it by adding gadgets and knives from respective games. About the customization menu, I thought it provided you the ability to change knives, pistols and rifles to your liking. Instead of that however, you just click a button to randomize the assets. Weapons are a complete downgrade to what the original experience was.
Interface – New menus and interfaces have been added to the modification, but they are iffy at best. While I don’t have serious problems with the main menu navigation, I have tons of complaints on the gameplay UI department. Some elements have HD texts, some are the pixels seen in the vanilla Battlefield 2. CPName_bla_bla_bla still exists, that’s not a huge surprise here. The UI is a mess for sure, I’d like to see more work put in this department.
Bots – The AI in Nations at War can either be playable, or absolutely braindead. Sometimes they can pass near you without doing any hostile activity, and others they can straight up snipe you with a rifle from really far away. This instability creates a frustrating experience. A lot of work needs to be spent in this department, since nearly every map I have played had issues with these folks.
Polish – Should I really emphasize how bad the polishing department of Nations at War is? Mismatched deployment and reloading sounds for weapons, weird ammo capacity for guns, UI problems, bot problems, and so on. This is an open secret.
Stability – Nations at War by far is the most unstable project I’ve ever played, only coming down second to Medal of Freedom. For you to understand everyone, take a generic high end system, and it manages to run poorly even on such an overboard config. Loading times are straight up suffering, taking over 5 minutes for a single location to load on an SSD. Sometimes the game rounds last shorter than loading screens themselves. Talk about optimization. Crashes also exist, some which are random during gameplay, and others happen after loading locations. And the cherry on top, the performance. 20FPS slideshows on an RTX 3080, top of the line GPU as of current release window. I’m afraid to see how lower end systems run this Standalone build.
Installation – For a wrap, the installation. Nations at War has by far, the worst ever installation procedure I’ve ever seen for a Battlefield 2 modification. Not split in zip files that are partitioned, not in executables that are partitioned. It’s a launcher that has miserable download speeds, only working with 2-3 files at a time. You can download Call of Duty Warzone faster than this Standalone mod, that’s not a joke. To add more insult to injury, the standalone build didn’t even work after the download finished, throwing me Battlefield 2 assets missing error. I found out that I needed to copy Battlefield 2 and Special Forces expansion packs themselves into the mods folder of Nations at War for it to finally work properly. How in the hell can someone release a mod in such a state?
Final Mark: 4/10
This is an extremely cut down version of my review. For full details and information, please check this content piece. There is a lot more said there than in this written review: Youtube.com
Definitely among the best mods for BF2.
The mod is very good but it has lot of bugs and glitchs
I am amazed at the amount of maps and vehicles! I only wish there were more choppers and planes in a map.
With BF3 being released last fall I find the lack of coop disappointing. This is the only mod I ever return too!
Keep up the great work guys, I know you said 6.0 was your Final Release but still hoping for updates :D
Very fun! A wide variety of weapons makes this even better!
From the great 6.0 version of the mod to the now sadly bad standalone version,filled with 5 minute and probably even longer loading screens,assets seen in other mods and assets from Frostbite BF titles which can nowadays be seen in modern copypasta mods,to even broken sound design where the weapon reload sound doesn't match the reload animation itself,it is sad to see that a great mod got reduced to just another really bad copypasta.
awesome
What vanilla BF2 wishes it could have been. If you're a vanilla player and you haven't played this, you're missing out. Big time.