Battlefield: Bad Company

Up to this point, the Battlefield series has been typically a PC shooter affair and the consoles have only had one game in the series, Battlefield 2: Modern Combat. While Battlefield 2: Modern Combat was the first Battlefield game made for consoles, EA and DICE's latest in the franchise is the first game to be made from the ground up for this generation of consoles and it is also the first game to not be on the PC. Battlefield Bad Company did surprise me for sure. I generally thought that Battlefield 2: Modern Combat was a weak game that was just a poor imitator of the great Battlefield games for the PC. Bad Company is definitely better than that game and it actually stands tall as being one of the better Battlefield games out there.

Battlefield Bad Company makes a first for the series as it actually has a proper single-player campaign with mission objectives, characters and a plot. It is a definite improvement over the previous bot matches that we are familar with from the series. In the game you play as Preston Marlowe who is a basic soldier to say the least who doesn't have much personality and doesn't have very many lines of dialogue. He is transfered to a unit that has been named Bad Company as these soldiers have been put there for making mistakes in the past. Overall, the characters in this squad actually make this story quite enjoyable and make the story mode more fun. There is Sergeant Redford who is your typical leader but he is in control of both Sweetwater and Haggard who are two soldiers that often bitch and moan about each other. Overall, the dialogue is well written and sometimes funny and the personality of these characters stands out, definitely compared to Marlowe.
Overall the actually single-player campaign isn't all that impressive but I am just glad that there is one though I think many players may feel disappointed that this isn't up to par to other games on the market. One of my biggest gripes is easily the AI. The enemies are generally actually pretty dangerous in this game but not in a good way. They are extremely accurate with their generally inaccurate weaponry which is just annoying as it feels that the game has an unfair advantage over you. While the enemies are good at fighting, your squadmates are next to useless. They will follow you around on almost every mission like a bad smell and it is just annoying as these guys don't do anything. They may kill someone once in a blue moon but for the most part, they serve as terrible bodyguards.
Another thing that annoyed me about the single-player campaign is that the game doesn't punish the player at all for dying. Reviews have compared this feature similar to BioShock's Vital Chambers and that is a good way of looking at it but at least BioShock makes that feature make sense. In Bad Company, you will die but you will just pop up again but will everything that happened before still happened and it just makes the experience feel very fake and underdeveloped.
I have been bashing the game for a while but there are some good merits to Bad Company. The Battlefield series has always been very influential on the gaming market as they were able to show people how to combine driving and shooting work together in a first-person shooter. Bad Company is no exception and throughout this campaign, you will often switch between the two styles of gameplay pretty much evenly. You will get to drive boats, helicopters, humvees, APCs and other vehicles like that and they all control pretty well though the control scheme takes some time to get used to. The shooting though isn't quite as good overall. The game doesn't feel very realistic compared to many shooters out there, even compared to Call of Duty 4. Most games reward the player for aiming and trying to use short controlled burst to help make more accurate shooting. Bad Company does do the aiming part pretty well allowing to play aim down the sights but they don't encourage burst firing and instead you just hold down the fire button. This style of shooting feels very strange for a game like this and it just feels bad for this genre. It also doesn't help that the guns are mostly inaccurate so these weapons aren't very fun to use. One thing the game definitely has going for it, is the ability to blow a whole in much all of the buildings in the game and you can even cut down trees. This makes the game more fun in a sense, just running around and blowing up defenses though the effect becomes somewhat tiresome fast and it is just another gimmick, similar to Red Faction's Geo-Mod technology.
Overall, this campaign isn't really recommended alone. Sure, the game combines a neat mix of on foot action and driving portions, but the AI is annoying and also the missions in the game are so goddamn long. When you think the mission is about to end, it continues. If this happened once or twice, maybe I would forgive it but since every mission did it, it sticks out that developers simply stapled another mission on to the current mission.

The multiplayer on the otherhand is definitely much better but it is what you would hope for considering it has the Battlefield name on it. As with all of the previous games in the series, the game is class based though some of the classes have been changed around and there aren't as many now. For example, heavy-machine gunner, medic and engineer are all rolled together as the support class and the Specialist is a mix of sub-machine guns and explosive devices. They tried to make less classes to probably make it more accessible though I would rather prefer having the old classes rather than trying to put them together as one here.  Generally, the classes are still balanced and the classes still rely on each other as much as ever.
 Bad Company shipped with only one mode called Gold Rush though the classic Conquest mode from the previous games made a return through free Downloadable Content over Xbox Live. Gold Rush is similar to the Assault Mode in Unreal Tournament and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars in that there are two teams, the attackers and the defenders. The attackers have to try and blow up a crate that has gold within and when they do, the defenders get pushed back and the process repeats. The defenders simply just have to make sure that doesn't happen. It is a good mode that definitely rewards one team or the other. There is rarely a case when a match is close, usually one team wins by a bit.
Since Conquest came out too, I might as well share my thoughts. There isn't actually much to say though. In this mode you take over different flags on the map and you have to make sure to keep those points to help make the enemies ticket count go down to zero to win the game. Pretty simple concept but still fun today, trying to get your team to have a good offense and defense at the same time. It is definitely more nerve-wracking than Gold Rush mode as a result.
I don't have too many complaints with multiplayer but I do have my gripes. For example, the weapons annoy me here again but even more so now because enemies take so many rounds of gunfire to go down, it is just a bit ridiculous sometimes. It is also very easy to complain about the lack of modes. Sure, it is great that Conquest did come out for the free but still, two modes isn't really enough to get  the player entertained and actually rank up to level 25. You do get unlockable weapons as you go but not enough to make it addictive and exciting and I definitely didn't get to Level 25 before writing this review. The game personally was too repetitive and there wasn't enough variety in the multiplayer that I would have liked.

The graphics in Battlefield Bad Company are very strong. DICE has created an all new engine for the game called Frostbite and it is rather impressive. It allows them to pump out very large levels with lots of action going on at once and also the destructible environments of course. It is also impressive that the framerate is always solid and overall, Bad Company looks very nice.
The sound is a similar story. The voice acting as mentioned is very sharp and well written and the music is definitely great though I can't help but miss the old Battlefield theme. The sounds of gunfire sound excellent and while these weapons aren't actually very powerful, they sure as hell feel like it. 

Overall, Battlefield Bad Company is definitely above decent and is a very competent game that proves that Battlefield can be done on consoles just as easily with the PC with the same work and effort. It was nice to have the new single-player campaign but it was too linear and dull to keep it interesting and the multiplayer is definitely fun for a while but after 10 hours, it becomes difficult to keep on playing. Thank you for reading.