Battlefield: Bad Company
Our Rating
7.8
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Your Rating
N/A
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There are few things that come to mind when most gamers think Battlefield, and I can tell you right now that single player and console are probably not chief among them. The guys at DICE have constructed a legacy of excellent, multiplayer-only shooters on the PC, and while there have been a couple attempts at a more couch-friendly Battlefield, these versions failed to really do the series justice.
This latest shot at a console Battlefield is much more ambitious than previous efforts going after the online multiplayer addict and fans of story-based, offline shooters. That's right a Battlefield game with a plot. Though it thankfully retains a multiplayer mode, Batttlefield: Bad Company puts its best foot forward with its solo campaign; unfortunately, that particular foot has a habit of stomping on nails.
What's immediately apparent about Battlefield: Bad Company is that this world is a lot like the one Metal Gear Solid 4 spends literally hours of cutscenes trying to explain. The idea of an economy entirely dependent on war doesn't seem so foreign here, since the only people you'll ever encounter in Bad Company are soldiers at war with one another for completely uncertain reasons and all of the cookie-cutter buildings you'll enter bare no furnishings beyond explosive barrels. There's even a presidential palace that looks like the guy just moved into the joint, because there's nothing in there but dozens of crates. Entire villages seem to exist solely as either cover from enemy fire or just an excuse to blow crap up, with very little sense of place, purpose, or normal human life..
Which brings me to another gripe about Bad Company's campaign: where the hell am I, again? The game rarely supplies any information about your location, mission, or your motives beyond the absurd gold-collecting subplot which eventually morphs into the story's focus. When intel about your current objective actually comes in, half of your squad is usually over in the corner goofing off evidently, the game is just as disinterested in the plot as I am. It's said a couple of times throughout the game that soldiers need to find their own reasons for war, but killing hundreds upon hundreds of mercenaries in the name of a treasure hunt sounds like the opposite of reason to me.
The game's big gimmick aside from its sense of humor, which mostly falls flat is the highly destructible environments. Having trouble with an enemy hiding inside of a house? Throw a grenade at the wall and Kool-Aid Man your way in there. Looking for a shortcut while driving a tank? Plow your way through the neighborhood. Like most games that boast such environmental malleability, not everything will explode on command, but what destruction is there comes at the cost of highly repetitive surroundings.
Despite such dynamically evolving, wide-open environs, the single-player levels in Bad Company feel monotonous and formulaic. Nearly every map boils down to driving through the countryside to get to a small settlement, clearing out said settlement of bad guys, and then either securing it from a second wave of fighters or moving on to the next town. This tedium ends up marring encounters that should have been much more exciting the level where you trade fire between tanks on a golf course, for instance.
This uninspired level progression would be tolerable if the enemy AI was any good whatsoever, but the troops in Bad Company come off as a throwback to AI circa 1999. They display all the symptoms of a hive mind, rendering stealth or strategy all but useless; the moment you shoot at anybody, every rifle within miles is trained on your skull. Beyond cheap garbage like that, the adversaries in Bad Company can be hilariously stupid; I've bore witness to an enemy mercenary who, upon entering the same room as me, carefully took aim at the corner of the building furthest from me and let loose with his grenade launcher. He followed up this feat of intellect by slowly pivoting until he reached his final target: the floor directly below him. These guys are simply not fun to fight, and when your game really has nothing to offer but fighting, you've got a problem.
It's a blessing, then, that the fellas at DICE still know how to make a great multiplayer game. The destructible cover fits here much better when you have intelligent, surprising adversaries to shoot at. In fact, this plays a lot like a natural, more explosive evolution of Battlefield 2. Rank-based weapon unlocks are back and more addictive than ever with the addition of tons of accomplishment-specific trophies and though the traditional Conquest mode is MIA it's coming in a free download sometime after release the new Gold Rush mode is just as entertaining. Much more focused than any of the prior games in the series, Gold Rush shrinks the max number of players to 24 and tasks them with either attacking or defending cases of gold which plays out a lot like the control point maps in Team Fortress 2. Because this mode corrals all of the players into sectioned-off areas with one or two objectives each, the reduced player count doesn't seem to negatively impact the traditional Battlefield carnage.
While Bad Company takes some bold and necessary steps toward success on consoles, its single-player campaign bears the stench of a first effort from a primarily PC-based, multiplayer-focused development team. Thankfully, the slightly stripped-down multiplayer here is still pretty exceptional.
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Our Score - Battlefield: Bad Company
7.8
overall
- Gameplay
- 7.7
- Visuals
- 7.3
- Audio
- 8.5
- Fun Factor
- 6.6
The Good: Multiplayer is pure, condensed Battlefield
The Bad: The solo campaign is mediocre at best
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