Developer: DICE
Publisher: EA
ESRB Rating: T (Teen)
Players: 1-24
Hours Played: 20
Progress: Completed the game
The Battlefield franchise is well known to PC gamers, as it has a solid reputation amongst massive-multi-player shooters. Although not new to console gaming, the series has taken an abrupt turn to a story driven, single player game (don?t worry there is still a considerable multi-player component) with the arrival of Battlefield: Bad Company.
The game?s main protagonist is Preston Marlow, who is placed with Bad Company; a group of misfit soldiers in the United States Military who, through a variety of different offenses, have found themselves in the army?s ?bad boys club?. Accompanying Marlow through the missions in the game are his squad mates: Haggard, who sounds eerily like Larry the Cable Guy and is just as dumb ? only Larry doesn?t carry around a rocket launcher, Sweetwater, the heavy machine gun operator who is constantly bickering with Haggard and Sarge, the hard-nosed leader of the squad.
When it comes to the story it?s all very light and comedic; Preston and his squad mates are part of an offensive with a fictional Eastern European nation and soon find themselves not only at odds with this country?s military forces and the group of mercenaries it has hired, but also the US Army. All of this is brought about through a sudden lust for gold that will take the squad to a number of different environments as the game progresses.
Much has been said about the comprehensive destructibility of the environment, which helps set the game apart from the crowded first person shooter genre, it is unfortunately not enough to carry the entire load to greatness. Having said that the destructible environment is a real treat, almost any building can be systematically demolished by blowing holes in it with a varied arsenal of grenade launchers, tanks and artillery. The biggest accomplishment is that the damage modeling is real-time and unscripted, that means that if you fire a grenade out of your gun-mounted grenade launcher a hole won?t open up in the exact same place every time that you fire at that building. Instead the damage is modeled real time and depending on where you fire the grenade (or other explosive device), the size and scope of the damage is determined.
This is especially a lot of fun when you?re trying to flush enemies out of cover: walk up to a building, fire a rocket or grenade at the wall (or use one of the many explosive barrels that dot the landscape), watch as it crumbles into a smoking pile of debris and storm inside, dispatching the stunned opponent, preferably at knife point. The scale of the destructibility is quite large as you don?t just have guns and the like at your disposal, but can also call in air strikes, artillery bombardments and bombing runs. If you got excited about blowing holes in walls wait until you can reduce buildings to just the metal frame after a few solid artillery rounds! There is also a healthy selection of vehicles, including tanks, which open up the battlefield with their explosive arsenal and mobility.
No doubt about it, the game?s destructibility is a lot of fun, however unfortunately there are a number of game play issues that hold it back. The enemy AI for instance is quite flawed: enemies typically have incredible lines of sight meaning that you?ll be shot at from afar, often through brush and foliage, stairways or other scenery, with their aim being uncannily accurate. This makes it tough to enjoy the action sometimes as you find yourself not being able to jump in and take care off enemies up close, but rather have to stay back and figure out where you?re being shot from. At the same time though, enemies can sometimes just stand around, oblivious to your presences a few feet away with combat going on all around.
There?s a health bar that keeps track of the player?s lifespan and it can be replenished by hitting the left trigger button, which produces an injector that will fill the health bar up again. There is no limit to the amount of uses the injector has, the player is only required to wait a short amount of time before being able to re-use it. There are very few consequences for dying in the game, the player respawns at the last checkpoint that was reached (and they are numerous) with all the enemies that were destroyed up until the point of death, still gone. Unfortunately sometimes this is the only way you?ll be able to beat a mission, such as the one where you?re taking on one group of tanks after the other; your tank?s lifespan will allow you to take down one or two tanks before being destroyed yourself, leaving the player to eliminate what he can, die, respawn, take care off a couple of more tanks, die again and repeat until eventually, all enemies have been destroyed ? lame!
The biggest hang-up however is the tired mission design. Your objectives are incredibly mundane in that you?ll be asked to blow up artillery batteries or seize certain objectives, all things you?ve done a million times before in similar shooters. The levels are large in scale and very open, but after a while of constantly doing the same thing it all gets a bit tiring. Add to that the fact that you encounter only two basic enemies: Russian soldiers and black-uniformed mercenaries, it all gets old pretty quick. Bad Company tries to combine a number of different game play elements into the game, and while it doesn?t fail terribly at any of them, fact is that it doesn?t provide the intense, modern military shooter experience Call of Duty 4 offers, nor does it provide the same in-depth squad based experience Rainbow 6 Vegas gives us, it also doesn?t provide the same level of open-world destructibility found in Mercenaries 2. Even though the game incorporates all these game play elements, it doesn?t do them as well as some of the other games in those genres.
Graphically the game has a few things going for it, of course the destructible environment, as discussed prior, are great to see. However in the current generation of consoles, with their graphical might, this should really be the norm, not the exception anymore. The draw distances in the game are fantastic, stand on a hill or better yet, fly in a helicopter and see in entire landscape drawn out in front of you without fogging or major pop-in., there are also surprisingly few frame rate issues, even when the action gets intense and buildings are coming down left and right. Perhaps not so good are the bland and fuzzy textures, as well as the lack off interior detail. Most buildings have a fairly basic design and sparse interiors- even the trees and bushes have bitmapped (2D) leaves and branches.
The audio is a real strong point of Bad Company; the ambient sound effects make it so that when an explosion goes off inside a building, there is an echo that?ll make your head ring, contrary to the outside where the sound doesn?t have walls on all sides to bounce off. Crank the audio up and your whole body will be shaking when explosions go off all around Marlow as tanks and artillery batteries take aim at the player. Unfortunately the music is very sparse, especially in-game, although the tunes during menus and such are quite enjoyable. Voice acting is solid and helps keep the light-hearted story on track.
Even though the focus was on the single-player mode in this Battlefield iteration, there is a very robust multi-player. Up to 24 players can participate as they have the choice of five different character classes to play with. All the vehicles, weapons and artillery options are available to the player through a comprehensive upgrade system. There are only eight maps available out-of-the-box, although it?s likely more will become available through download.
Summary:
Graphics
+ Incredible draw distances on large, open maps
+ Solid frame rate
+ Comprehensive destructibility of environments
– Hazy and plain textures
– Lack of detail with interior environments
Audio
+ Fantastic sound effects (bone-rattling explosions and gunfire)
– Lack of in-game music
Gameplay
+ Action-packed gameplay, plenty of opportunity to make things go ?BOOM?!
+ Game progression is not as linear as most shooters due to open map design
– Tired mission objectives
– Frustrating AI due to enemies having unnatural line of sights
Lasting appeal
+ Lengthy maps and objectives, hidden guns and treasure chests make them worth exploring
+ Solid multi-player
– Mundane missions and cookie-cutter shooter mechanics will tire most gamers before the end
Overall:
7.4
An entertaining departure from the usual Battlefield games for the consoles; don?t get caught up in the hype however: the destructibility of the environments will tire eventually and what?s left is a perfectly serviceable shooter, that doesn?t supplant the games it borrows from but at best provides a temporary distraction. A rental is recommended before you consider buying this, especially if you already have a healthy collection of FPS games.
