games: Battlefield: Bad Company

The single player campaign has you playing Private Preston Marlowe, in a squad of four US army n’er-do-wells known as ‘Bad Company’. They are treated as cannon fodder by their superiors in a fictional war against the Russian Federation. The plot takes you on a nicely varied mix of army missions and the self appointed ‘missions’ of the squad who go AWOL part way in when they realize some of their enemies are paid in gold bars.

Bad Company offers a refreshing change in plot, tone and character for a military FPS. The guys in your squad are actually all pretty likeable, even the knuckle head explosives fan Haggard. They’ve also been well scripted with good humour, good voice acting and nicely done cut scenes showing that a decent amount of care and thought has gone into putting this together.

The engine is pretty slick too. The game claims 90% destructable scenery - which seems reasonably accurate and is not only cool, but also means it’s a lot harder to rely on cover for long making play more interesting. Sometimes things are a little silly, like not being able to open doors to houses but having to grenade them open.

But overall it’s a pretty coherent world. It looks good too with lots of sharp and nicely detailed scenery about. The campaign map is nicely set out and feels like a realistic set of locations rather than an artificial construct to run from objective to objective in. To this end, there is also a certain amount of freedom in how you move through the game, and a decent range of nicely handling vehicles to aid in this.

There’s also a pretty good range of 35 guns, all real-world infantry, but including some prototypes and cancelled designs. They feel nice and there’s a cool collection element to the weapons you can find in a level and information about each gun. You can only carry one gun at a time, and you’ll sometimes need to find a specific gun for the job. But you can also use grenades, your knife, and an array of tools including a rather neat health injector which is unlimited but will take a few seconds to use and leave you vulnerable while your hands are busy and so not on your gun.

But should you die, it’s not the end of the world. Perhaps to mitigate the fact that the game is pretty hard, when you die, for the most part you simply respawn a few paces back, with anyone you’ve taken out remaining dead. And yes, the AI is hard, with relentlessly accurate shots, although neither your enemies nor your team mates have huge amounts of cooperation programmed into them. But hey, the multiplayer is shaping up to be pretty good with the Gold Rush mode included where you must attack or defend crates of gold, and Conquest available as a free post-release download.

Overall a very solid and polished FPS put together with care and charm. Battlefield: Bad Company is a recommended buy and gets itself a well-earned 4 stars.

For the best of the rest:

Euro Gamer:
Bad Company is very much the kind of army I could imagine Eurogamer inhabiting. Comprised of all the ne’er-do-wells, workshy fops and insubordinates that you wouldn’t even want on your paintball team, we’d be the guys any sensible army would send out as cannon fodder to lull the opposition into a false sense of security. Of course, what would transpire is that we were only pretending to be shot-shy slackers, and, when put in life-or-death scenarios we’d rise to the challenge and kick everyone’s arse.

IGN:
The rules of first-person shooters are changing. Videogames that engage the player in acts of war have always promised one thing; cover. During times of extreme duress the player has always had the option of retreating behind a wall or group of immovable sandbags in order to escape their assailants. Battlefield: Bad Company, the latest from the Sweden-based Digital Illusions CE (DICE), changes all that.

Trusted Reviews:
On the PC, Battlefield is one of the biggest names there is. It’s the daddy of large-scale online shooters; the online war that everybody wants to sign up for. On the console formats, however, the brand hasn’t had the same sort of impact, and a lot of that comes down to the fact that, while online action games have a healthy audience on the Xbox 360 and PS3, it’s the single player game that drives sales. For all that, Battlefield: Modern Combat did a fine job of bringing a slightly cut-down Battlefield to consoles, it didn’t quite work so well when played alone. It’s more recent imitator - the thoroughly decent Frontlines: Fuel of War - provided a slightly more convincing campaign, but even this wasn’t enough to steal hearts and minds from the likes of Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4. Battlefield: Bad Company, then, is DICE’s attempt to stamp its ground in the console arena, and prove that Battlefield and single-player can mix.