If you haven't noticed yet, the Battlefield 2: Modern Combat demo has hit the Xbox Live Marketplace.

I downloaded it this afternoon, and thanks to Microsoft's blazingly fast servers I was able to play the game five hours later. Anyway, all joking about Xbox Live's download speeds aside - I was excited to try out the game.

I never was a huge Battlefield 1942 fan, but I did really enjoy games like Star Wars Battlefront II, so I know that I do like these types of games. Oh, and I've played Battlefield 2 on the PC before, so I knew more or less what I was getting into.

Anyway, I'll make an otherwise long post rather short by saying this game is very much like...well, Battlefield 2. If you've played it on the PC it's mostly the same. It has the flaw of most PC to console port - you know, with the controls not feeling exactly all the way there?

The graphics are great, the level contained in the demo is a spacious urban environment with lots of room to explore the torn down city. The sound was a little bit weak, and the guns didn't really feel like you were shooting them. The gameplay was pretty solid, but after spending about 45 minutes playing the demo, I can't imagine wanting to own the game - and maybe it was because I played the same level repeatedly - but something about this game got very vanilla, very fast.

Based on this demo, it's hard to say whether I recommend BF2 or not. I'm going to go ahead and say "no." But, it's a close call - if you're a fan of the BF franchise or games where you have to capture points on a map and hold them (I'm not quite sure the name of the genre) I guess I'd say it's worth picking up.

Oh, but if for some reason you can't play on Xbox Live and you're thinking about buying this game solely for the single player, I would strongly advise against it.

Anyway, that's just my opinion - check out the demo for yourself, it's on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Let me know what you think.