The first attempt at a single-player Battlefield game is good.
BF: BC is a military first person shooter in the battlefield franchise. This is the first battlefield game to have a meaningful story campaign. In past battlefield games the real meat of the game was the multi-player component.
The story of BF: BC follows Bad Company, a group of misfit convicts that don’t get sentenced jail time and instead get placed in the army. The crew completes their missions as they are told to by their superiors. After fighting their way up a hill they discover that they are fighting mercenaries hired by a legionnaire who loves gold. This sets off the Three Kings style quest for gold.
The story is actually really good. It’s a humorous take on war told through cut scenes viewed through your characters eyes. The fact that you usually only fight with three other soldiers allows to connect with them easily. The story keeps you entertained all the way through the game until a final battle with the legionnaire which ends the game abruptly. By the end of the game you realize that the game isn’t all that long.
The gameplay is usually the standard FPS type gameplay broken up with a few vehicle segments. All the vehicles you see in the game are fully drivable. An interesting new design choice that makes the game pretty easy is that when you die you respawn with no penalty back in the world. All the enemies you killed and objectives you completed before dyeing stay the way they are.
A back of box feature that the game includes is almost fully destroyable environments. Basically if you cause an explosion on or next to a wall or a tree or something it gets blown up. The reason I say *almost* destroyable is because while you can blow holes in walls the foundation and certain parts of the building stay invulnerable and trees can only break at a certain point. In single-player this would feel like more of a feature and not a gimmick if the AI were to use their own holes to get to you. However, in multi-player this is used more effectively
The multi-player is extremely fun. It offers the same leveling up system from Call of Duty 4 and the same team oriented, class based, competitive gameplay from past Battlefield. The game offers several different maps with good variety in landscape but they generally play the same. This was supposed to be the first single-player centric although being a Battlefield game the real meat of the game is the multi-player.
The game comes with only one gametype on the disc. It’s a fun gametype called goldrush in which one team must defend crates of gold while the other team must destroy them. It offers for some good strategy but from my experience the attacking team usually seems to win more often. It’s a real bummer that the game only comes with one gametype but developer Dice says that they will patch in more for free.
Battlefield: Bad Company offers a good but below average length single-player campaign and a fun multi-player component that will keep me coming back for more.
