Written by Jeff Buckland, 6/25/2008
Played on:
Xbox 360
I'm not sure why Battlefield: Bad Company is only being released on consoles, as the series was born on the PC and this game could have worked just fine on its home platform. Many PC gamers are feeling a bit betrayed, but console gamers who have been unimpressed with EA's half-hearted attempts to bring Battlefield to Sony and Microsoft platforms finally have something to look forward to. Battlefield: Bad Company, riding high on an impressive new game engine, tried and true gameplay, and sprinkles of half-decent comedy, really is the first console game in the series to seem like it really belongs.
The first thing to mention about Bad Company is that this is the first Battlefield game to include a real, honest, entertaining single player mode. Farting around with bots in the previous PC games was mildly amusing for a half hour at the most, and a couple of console iterations made failed attempts at campaigns that were more tedium than fun to get through. Here, you'll play as Private Marlowe who has been reassigned, due to some kind of serious offense, to the B Company of the 222nd Battalion - otherwise known as Bad Company. These guys are the whipping boys of the US Army, sent in as the most expendable troops when the brass doesn't want to risk more skilled soldiers to random fire from the enemies in the Russian Army. But with the help of Marlowe, you'll quickly find out that Bad Company is sometimes exactly what's needed, as their "screw it, let's just do this" attitude often winds up getting them some unexpected positive results.
And your playing style should reflect that, too. Go in storming the place and just keep on stabbing yourself with your needle whenever you're low on health (more on this soon), and you'll find yourself taking less damage and leveling whole villages and buildings with surprising efficiency. This isn't to say that you need to go in shooting wildly, because that most certainly will get you killed. But try shooting a couple of explosive barrels to blow open whole walls and expose hidden enemies, then just drive right in. And speaking of explosives just sitting out in the environment, this is pretty much the culmination of 15 years of first person shooters trying to do fun and useful things with exploding barrels. In DOOM, we baited demons to get close to barrels for a quick kill. In Deus Ex, we moved explosive barrels and TNT crates around to take out enemy robots and even shortcut our way past a door whose lock we couldn't pick. Here, we use the game's many barrels, fuel tanks, and launched grenades to take out whole sections of buildings at once along with soldiers, too. It's like the exploding barrel finally grew up.
While DICE's new Frostbite engine is certainly good at making pieces of buildings go bye-bye, it's still not quite the fully destructible system you likely have been wishing for over the last decade. Crates can take rocket launcher hits without a scratch and the ground simply cannot be disturbed, and while walls can be torn off of buildings easily, you simply can't take out floors/ceilings or cause a whole building to actually collapse. Still, the rest of the engine is impressive, with solid frame rates even in the 24-player online modes. The graphics and art style aren't quite at the highest of the top notch, but they're still generally well-done with few rough spots.
But before we go hog-wild on the multiplayer action, let's stick with the campaign for a bit. As Bad Company (well, four guys in it, I guess - I understand the name of the game must be catchy, but this is more like "Bad Squad"), you'll raise hell pretty often and look good doing it. Your three squad members can't be ordered around, but I found that they generally do pretty well and covered my backside on quite a few occasions. That being said, they still screw up now and then, but hell, my squad did stupid things just as often in Gears of War and I didn't complain much then. When you get low on health, it won't automatically regenerate for you like you might be used to by now with today's shooters. Instead, Marlowe always has his trusty needle which he's happy to stab himself with almost as often as you can press the button, and since there's a short recharge timer on it, you'll find out quickly that it's almost like having a recharging health bar. Plus, there are many checkpoints throughout each level so you won't have to ever redo more than maybe one or two minutes of fighting at the absolute most.
The general game structure is to drop you on a map with a specific objective and only the area required to complete that mission will be open to you - straying from the mission area for more than a rather un-generous five seconds will magically cause artillery to rain down directly on your position, instantly killing you. That's annoying, but if you just consider the red zone on your map to be lava, then it's easier to deal with. Once you finish the objective, new territory opens up along with a new mission, which can repeat itself a number of times on a single map.
