Blowing Holes in Walls
By Shaunage 1 Comments
I'm not generally a big fan of War based shooters. I pretty much completely ignored them until the reviews for COD2 at the 360 launch came out.
Thankyou, Mr. Gerstmann.
Bad Company, even as the first single player campaign in the BF series, tells a truly fantastic story which could not be further removed from the standard military story I went in expecting. I'm not going to spoil anything, but the ending is absolutely superb and is EXACTLY the one I wanted. A high point in gaming this generation. Infact, that's how I'd describe nearly everything about the game.
One of the first things that happens in Bad Company is that you are asked to "Blow a hole in this house" to see if there's anything useful inside. I cracked out my grenade launcher (something included as secondary fire with pretty well every gun in the game, for soon to become obvious reasons) and fired at the door. The door blew to pieces, but the objective didn't trigger. I wandered around the house for a while before rethinking what I'd been asked to do. Back out the front of the house, aim slightly to the left of the door and fire another grenade. A large chunk of the wall blows away completely and I sit there in shock. I start thinking about how this would only work on very specific walls and how that was a huge waste. Consider me pleasantly surprised on that front. Pretty well every single piece of anything in the game can have holes blown in it, to the point where you can reduce every house in the game to a floor and framework if you so wish. This plays into strategy, obviously, since it means any piece of cover is temporary, both for you and for enemies. Much of the first half of the game consisted of me hiding from tanks behind houses and becoming frantic seconds later when I turned around and realised the entire house was gone. Another "There's no way this will actually work" moment came when I blew a hole in the roof of a house from inside the attic and jokingly attempted to jump out of it up onto the roof. This works fine and you can use it to get on top of pretty much anything you want.
The destructible environments also lend another major factor to the game. Convenience. There's a fence in your way? Cut it up with one blow of your knife and keep running. No door on this side of the house? Make your own. This is one of the best additions to any game this generation and I am already seriously missing it in every other game. This feature needs to be standard. This is HUGE.
The rest of the game plays a lot like Call of Duty 4 and I think it's of very similar quality. I may well have liked Bad Company more. I'm not ready to make that call yet, but I need to mention how close it is. It is a very different style of game, for as similar as the gameplay is. The characters in Bad Company are all likeable and for the most part are genuinely funny. The story goes in a veeeeeeery different direction to COD4. It's barely a military game at all. A game with a story like this needed to exist and it's just one more addition to a genuinely brilliant experience.
A leftover from the multiplayer side of Battlefield is that you respawn immediately with no penalty upon death. This means there is no frustration here to ruin the experience. The health recharging system involves you switching to an item (one button) and using it (and it has infinite uses and recharges in ten seconds) to instantly regain 100% health. I don't think I prefer this to halo style recharging health, but it's a solid alternative and the animation is hilarious. Not deliberately. I don't think.
Surely I have a complaint with the game? Yeah. The controls are on different buttons than the standard and by the end of the 12-15 hour game I STILL wasn't used to it. You can probably change the controls so yeah, that's probably my own fault. There is so much else I loved I haven't found a place to mention. The main thing would be the items that call in airstrikes. Those are amazing.
The main thing I took away from the experience is that Battlefield: Bad Company is a game that doesn't hate you. It wants you to have fun and is designed completely around this. Many developers could learn a lot from playing this.