Good ideas, bad campaign and little content
Pros:
-Nice graphics
-Destructible environments is a cool feature
-Vehicles are fun
-Bullets dropping over long distances is a nice touch
-Gameplay is solid
Cons:
-Campaign is short and forgettable
-Maps are too large making it hard to find people and reach objectives
-Lack of multiplayer features is disappointing
Battlefield Bad Company 2 is a game that has a lot of good ideas and promise, but doesn't live up to them. It's campaign is weak, it's multiplayer lacks variety, and as a whole, it's an overall disappointment. It may lure you with it's nice graphics and unique ideas, but once your in you find a very empty and uninspired game.
The campaign of Bad Company 2 features 12 chapters which will take you from snowy mountain highways, dense jungle forests and rivers, harsh deserts, and more. Each mission plays out much like the last, with action that tries to be over-the-top but doesn't succeed, and offers little variety in it's objectives or gameplay. Each chapter follows the same formula, move into areas with your crew and shoot bad guys, move into new area, shoot more bad guys, rinse and repeat. Once in a while Bad Company 2 will mix it up a little with things like being inside a helicopter, but these are too few and far between. The storyline revolves around you and your crew trying to secure scalar weapon device, however the storyline it's self is so weak that you won't ever care about it to begin with.
Even more forgettable are the characters, Marlowe (your character), Hags the demolitions expert, Sweets the tech expert, and Sarge. None of these characters have any real personality, and they speak with boring military-jargon that you have come to expect. The campaign is fairly short and it's not memorable in the slightest, it's as generic as you can get. And at times if feels more like a chore. At no point do you ever feel compelled to really complete it.
Thankfully Bad Company 2 offers mulitplayer, which is where the real meat of the game is at. Allowing up to 24 players, Bad Company 2 offers good sized battles that help it feel like a war zone, well almost anyway. Even for 24 people, the maps are far too large, causing you to find it hard to engage with enemies and reach objectives quickly. There is a good variety of different vehicles which are fun to use and will help you get around quicker, but only a limited number can be used at a time and it takes quite a while for them to re-spawn again. It simply takes too long to get from location to location and objective to objective by foot, and unfortunately Bad Company 2 offers little in the way to fix this.
Map sizes are always the same, the number of vehicles that spawn is always fixed, bases and spawn areas remain in the same location, there is not much you can do to improve the online experience. Even more disappointing is the lack of variety, Bad Company 2 features only 3 modes: Squad Deathmatch, Conquest, and Rush. Squad Deathmatch pits you with a crew of 4 against 3 other squads and it plays much like any other standard team deathmatch experience, the first team to get the maximum number or the highest amount of kills when the time runs out wins. Then there is Conquest, where each team fights over objective areas and tries to hold them as long as possible. And finally there is Rush, a mode where one team is tasked with planting explosives, and the other is tasked with defending them. These modes are ok at best but they don't try anything that other shooters out there don't do already, and the lack of content is very disappointing, this makes Bad Company 2 a weaker online experience.
The multiplayer is also class based which features Assault, Recon, Engineer, and Medic. Each of which has it's own strategies and weapons, for instance the Assault class is armed with a larger arsenal of weapons and can dish out more pain than the other classes, where as the Engineer can fix vehicles and lay explosives, the Recon can sneak around and snipe, and the Medic can revive people. It's pretty standard to other team based shooters out there, which isn't a bad thing in it's self, but Bad Company 2 simply does not offer as good of a class based experience as well as those other games. Bad Company 2 simply feels too generic.
The gameplay it's self is pretty solid however, and employs several unique design ideas. Guns are fun to shoot and feel pretty powerful, bullets drop distance over time and can go through objects, environments are fully destructible, allowing you to lay waste to buildings and other objects. And visually the game is quite nice, textures are sharp and detailed, the environments are quite beautiful and nice to look at, and the lighting is powerful and dynamic. Unfortunately however, these good ideas don't make up for the negative aspects of the game.
Final Verdict:
Bad Company 2 is too generic for it's own good. It has some good moments and great ideas, but it's mediocre amount of content and lack of implementation stop them from becoming fully realized.
Battlefield Bad Company 2 get's a 3/5
