Tonight I finished the Battlefield: Bad Company campaign on "hard" difficulty and now have earned all 30 of the achievements (610 points) that don't require playing multiplayer mode, getting me to a nice even 7,500 points.

I'd give the game an 8 out of 10; not a $60 game (got mine for less than $40 new; Target lowered the price to $39.99 but didn't have any in stock so I got a raincheck and took it to Circuit City where they sold it to me for 10% less than $39.99; they had it on the shelf for $59.99). The downloadable demo is exactly like the game (including one of the two multiplayer modes), so if you didn't care for the demo, then pass on the game. I wouldn't call myself a shooter fan, and I avoid war-based games that are "real", i.e. no aliens or zombies or non-Earth settings (i.e. not enough escapism), but I found the humor entertaining and the story (about stealing gold from mercenaries) engaging.

There are seven missions, counting the tutorial introduction. When you are with your three squad members, there is funny banter both during cutscenes and at various points while you're in-mission. However, in the fifth mission, most of the time is spent piloting a helicopter; when you do get out, only one squad members comes along; there is little banter as a result, and it is often drowned out by the sound of the helicopter. In the sixth mission, your squad has been captured and you spend nearly the whole mission finding them; so there's no banter through the bulk of this mission. These two missions back to back, despite being a logical progression, took a lot of the charm out of the game, but the helicopter and the solo mission did mix up the gameplay (the solo mission was especially challenging since you wake up in a town with plenty of baddies, and only a pistol with 24 bullets and a knife to defend yourself). The last mission is played with the full squad, and is back to business-as-usual up through the "final" boss battle (of course the boss doesn't really die; bring on the sequel).

I have only played a little multiplayer, and prefer the downloadable Conquest mode, which is the same as one of the modes in Star Wars Battlefront II, which I played a lot of over Live on the original Xbox.