Bad Company is nearly perfect game.
Battlefield: Bad Company looked like your average shooter when it was first announced but attention was quickly increased when D.I.C.E. said that the environments in Bad Company where 90% destructible, and after numerous delays and a month of fragging in a demo, Bad Company is finally here.
Battlefield: Bad Company is a first time for the Battlefield series in many ways,
A) It’s the first Battlefield game that isn’t a spin-off of the PC version of the franchise, B) Battlefield Bad Company is the first Battlefield game with a fleshed out campaign, and C) It features destruction like we have never seen and revolutionizes the way we play shooters. You start out the game as Preston Marlow, a troop who was transferred to B-Company nicknamed Bad-Company due to the high mortality rate of its soldiers. You join a squad with Sweetwater, Haggard, and Sarge. All of whom you will instantly attach yourselves to as they have very distinctive personalities. There are three difficulties to choose from including Easy, , and Hard. My first problem with the game is the achievements don’t stack so if you beat the game on Hard, you have to re-beat the game on to get all the achievements for level completion. But this is easily over-looked as you are going to want to play the campaign over again to find all the collectables and gold in the levels. One thing with the story that might throw people off is the fact that the story and characters are humorous, even some of the big plot twists done in the flavor of humor which is honestly a good thing. I’m a little sick of the entire “Humanities last hope, blah, blah, blah.” story setting. Much like Halo 3’s single-player, intense firefights are broken up between driving sessions which are done very well. One other thing to be noted here is this game contains 0% frustration as when you die, it reloads you from your last checkpoint, but all the enemies you killed remain dead so it really helps keep the game moving and taking some of the trial an error part out of the game. Unlike Call of Duty 4, Gears of War, and Halo 3; Bad Company doesn’t use the rechargeable health system. Instead you get an “Auto-Injector” which restores your health instantly to 100% but it needs to recharge so it does add a little bit of strategy to the health about carefully planning on when to use it, however it does recharge rather quickly and sometimes you feel as if you constantly need to use it. Some of the enemy A.I. seems intelligent while some seem incredibly stupid however this is very minor as for what they lack in brain power they make up for shear numbers and firepower. The single player should take you about 10-15 hours depending on the difficulty and at the very least offers a good way to get introduced to the multiplayer however, if you can get passed the fact that this isn’t meant to have an ultra serious setting and story, you’re going to find a great experience offline.
Next inline is the multiplayer in which the series just shines and this is no exception. There currently is only one game mode “Gold Rush” which is Search and Destroy on steroids. The attackers start out at a base and have ticket respawn meter so the team can only respawn so many times before they run out and the Defenders win. Defenders on the other hand start out at a different base and have two gold crates to defend. If attackers blow up the crates, they take the base and the defenders are forced to fall back and every time they do, it gets easier and easier to defend the crates. Defenders can spawn an infinite number of times. This new game type focuses on two bases at once which keeps the action moving forward and fast pace that it some times this game is a borderline twitch shooter. There are eight maps to play all excellently designed, with numerous vehicles that are placed in all the right places. One of the greatest things about the multiplayer is the balance of the weapons. Things like grenade spamming, dolphin diving, spawn killing are a thing of the past in this game (with the exception of the occasional spawn kill) splash damage from rocket launchers and grenades have been reduced to prevent abuse and players can no longer go prone, and there is no one weapon to rule them all. For instance take the M4A16 and the M16A3 if two players ten feet apart from each other stood perfectly still and each player aimed at the chest and started firing at the same time either bother players would die, or one would walk away on the verge of death. There are five classes to choose from Assault, Demolition, Recon, Specialist, and Support. All have very distinctive features and take experience to master. To unlock more weapons you have to rank up and there are 25 ranks total. Another cool aspect of the game is when you knife someone; you take their dog tag and start a collection of all the ones you’ve taken. Dog tags with images on them also represent trophies which you get for performing certain things like “In a round: six kills with the shotgun” ect. Spawning is the same as it always been except in Gold Rush you can only spawn in two places 1) your base (the safest with all the vehicles) or 2) with your squad (quickest way to the action, unsafe). You are randomly set into a squad with three other people and unfortunately they’re the only people you can talk to which puts a bit of a hamper on the game as Battlefield is largely a team based game so not being able to communicate when you need health or repairs complicates thing, but to help out icons are placed on your map that represent a person who needs health or a person a support person and the same thing is done with repairs. Almost forgot to mention you can take photos, but it doesn’t work the best as its ingame so catching that weird death position via theater mode in Halo 3 isn’t going to happen but it still is a nice feature.
The destruction does a nice job of thinking that wall is crumbling into pieces at you blow it out with your grenade launcher. By the end of the game the maps never look the same as walls and buildings are just destroyed. This makes it even harder, or in some cases easier to defend the gold crates. While Bad Company isn’t a realistic game by any means the destruction sure helps you feel as if you were in a warzone. Couple that with some of the best sound effects I’ve ever heard in this game (it’s a crime not to play this game in 5.1 surround sound, it will blow your ear drums out.) and the graphics are great, but they do have the infamous “movie grain” effect from Mass Effect except there isn’t an option to turn it off so if your not playing this game in High Definition, textures are going look especially bad. The frame rate should be noted as it holds up amazing for a game with walls and trees and everything else blowing up on large maps every other second with twenty-four players in a match (sorry I forgot to mention that earlier).
In the end Bad Company delivers a shooter experience like no other and you will play this game well up until November 7, which lets face, just about every other game is going to be empty that day but once Xbox Live slowly de-saturates from Gears of War you will still be playing this, and Bad Company if more maps come in the form of free DLC will last until D.I.C.E. decides to make another one.
