Battlefield 2 is a war game set in Kazakhstan, one of the former Soviet republics so beloved in this sort of thing. As New York is to romantic comedies, Central Asia is to war games. Watch for two or three set in Turkmenistan before the year is out.

Central Asia is hot in war games because it's far away and full of rugged terrain, and also because it's rich with oil and gas, and especially because if you set a game there, you don't have to deal with any awkward questions of how you and your enormous game-development company lean in the George Bush-yes-or-no debate. Put your game in Central Asia, and you can pretend that war is still about lantern-jawed commanding officers with Southern accents giving orders to highly-trained soldiers, all of whom are committed to the twin causes of country and civility. You can pretend it's fun, instead of the hell the news out of Iraq suggests it is. You can make it look like a sexy adventure.

Video games get to be apolitical, though, because their core audience (i.e. unwashed men in their 20s, slouching on their couches under a thin blanket of Cheetos dust) is apolitical. Nobody cares what a video game has to say about war, except whether the weapons bang loudly enough and whether the controls feel tight enough under the thumbs.

On that scoreboard, Battlefield 2 is uneven. It is a first-person shooting game, and it suffers from the nausea-inducing frame-rate jitters that characterize middling first-person shooting games. It is dark and gritty, presumably because dark and gritty = cool and authentic, and also because all the other first-person shooting games are dark and gritty too, and nobody wants to be the first developer to try something fresh. In its setting, and in its execution, the thing is utterly generic.

There are a few pleasant surprises, though, and a few that are merely surprising. The first is something called “hot swapping.” This is a bit like being a ghost, or maybe like being that demon from The Exorcist. As you control your soldier, you can see the other soldiers in your squad on a little radar dial in the corner, represented by blue icons. On the main screen, where you see what your soldier sees, the same little blue icons float above your comrades' heads. Occasionally one of the icons turns white, which means that you can, if you wish, abandon your current grunt and posess the soldier with the white icon. The camera goes all blurry as you fly out of one body and up into the sky and then down into another. The speed is exhilarating. It feels supernatural and powerful. If the target soldier should happen to be carrying a bigger gun than the one you left behind, it feels positively godlike.

On the down side, Battlefield 2 is terribly slapdash about the rules. You can do a bang-up job of killing all the bad guys on a snowy Kazakh street, conserving your ammo and protecting your buddies and everything, and be ready to move on to the checkpoint, when suddenly a new crop will appear out of the ether. There will be a new bad guy on a balcony, and a new bad guy on one roof and another on another roof, and there will be four of them just behind a nearby parked bus. In Pac-Man, we expect that the ghosts will re-generate themselves. When that sort of thing happens in a gritty war game, it feels like somebody is cheating.

The spontaneous re-generation and the hot swapping combine to make the whole exercise feel unreal and cartoonish, more like arcade-style target shooting than anything so harrowing as, you know, war. Maybe that's the point. But the package is flat, and the play just isn't fun enough. Quirky only goes so far, is all.