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EA DICE’s Battlefield franchise takes consoles by storm. With Bad Company, EA DICE has successfully translated the action-packed, frenetic, and fun Battlefield series to consoles. This is a game where peace lasts preciously little, and thanks to a full-featured single-player mode, one that you can enjoy both offline and online.
In Battlefield: Bad Company, you play as Preston Marlowe, a Private that has been sent to the 222nd Battalion---B Company---a battalion the Army very willingly likes to sacrifice. The story starts off plausible enough as you meet the rest of the four-man squad. You’ll fight alongside Haggard (an explosions expert), Sweetwater (a young man looking for a scholarship) and Redford (a veteran who can’t wait to retire). Eventually, the Army leaves you behind enemy lines and the squad decides to find gold, all while rescuing a dictator. The story is told with plenty of humor and the single-player campaign is surprisingly fleshed out for a Battlefield game.
What really separates the gameplay is the fact that nearly everything in the game is user destructible. It changes your strategy quite a bit when you know that instead of taking out individual soldiers, you can simply shoot the entire building down. The squadmates that you’re with are quite funny, although they’re not very helpful in practice. Thankfully, they aren’t a liability, either. The enemies aren’t particularly smart either but the game throws enough of them at you that you’ll be kept busy. The game includes regenerating health, in a way, since you have the ability to fill up your health using an injector. There is a short recharge period and it sort of makes more sense than the simple waiting system found in other games, but it still looks a bit silly, especially when you use if often.
As fun as the singleplayer mode is, you’ll probably spend most of your time playing the game’s multiplayer mode, called Gold Rush. The mode itself is simply a defend mode, where one team is trying to protect something (crates of gold here) while the other is trying to destroy it. However, Bad Company’s huge maps and insane vehicle list (you’ll find boats, choppers, tanks and jeeps here) take the action up several notches. The game includes five character classes, each of which has special abilities that differentiate them and help balance the game. Toss in a persistent ranking system that rewards you with new weapons, and you have a combination that’s hard to beat.
Visually, EA DICE’s Frostbite engine is stunning. The character models are very detailed and move around the scenery realistically. The gun models look the part, too. The destructible environments, though, take the cake. Not everything can be blown up but almost anything can, which really changes the gameplay dynamic, but more simply, is just awesome to watch. Buildings that are there are there beginning won’t necessarily be there at the end and to be able to watch the destruction occur in real time is quite a treat. The explosions are quite good, too.
In terms of sound, the effects are the real winner here. There is some nice aural music and the dialogue in the game is witty and well-delivered, but hearing an explosion go off beside you is simply amazing. The gunfire sounds great, also. Fantastic use of surround sound really brings the war to life.
Battlefield: Bad Company is one of the most entertaining shooters ever released. Being able to destroy (nearly anything at your whim), a deep and fun multiplayer mode, and a fleshed out singleplayer mode make the game stand out. -- Jose Liz, PGNx Media
---- Jun 29, 2008
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