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Battlefield: Bad Company
Why is this game supposed to be good?
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I like single-player games. I like multi-player as well, but I really enjoy a good single-player campaign with an interesting story. I bought "Battlefield: Bad Company" because I was under the impression from all the other reviews that this was going to be a very well-written and funny game. Look, I'm a comedian, and making a comedian laugh is one of the easiest things in the world, it is said amongst us all the time that making an audience laugh is the real challenge. I cannot for the life of me understand who found this game THAT funny. I don't even think I've cracked a smile once.
The humor in the game is derived from the fact that you are part of Bad Company, a group of soldiers that have committed crimes and instead of facing court-martial they have been sent to a specific platoon of bad boys that undergo exceptionally dangerous missions. Certifiably a constitutional nightmare. But because this is a group of bad-asses that have all been stuck together the hilarity ensues, or at least it was supposed to. I personally found the jokes to be thin, unfunny, and juvenile.
Enough about the lame story though, let's talk about what IS good about this game. BLOWING SHIT UP! This is the first title I've ever seen that allows you to destroy almost everything. Is there a guy in that house over there you want to kill? Well, instead of finding an entrance why don't you just take out your grenade launcher and blow a hole in the wall. That is now an option, and believe me it feels really good. If you're one of those gamers that loves big explosions and massive destruction then a romp through the single-player campaign will be entertaining, story-aside. It is also very exciting to try and hide in a building and then all of a sudden the wall next to you explodes and 3 guys are hammering you with gunfire.
I'm sure the makers of the game would like reviewers to extol the virtues of their multiple vehicle system, but honestly this is standard fare now and nothing that brings much in terms of game play to an FPS. At the very least you have to make your vehicles as exciting as Halo 3, and when you have to hit a button to change seats, camera view, and not be able to move anymore JUST so you can shoot at something it makes them pretty useless.
One very neat game play device that I liked was the requirement to inject yourself with an item to renew your health rather than the automatically rejuvenating shields and health that plagues most FPS games nowadays. I guess I'm one of the rare few that actually think there should be health put back into these titles as the combat over health packs was always fun. You have unlimited injections, but you still have to take the time to find cover and administer the injection.
The multi-player in "Battlefield: Bad Company" is fun, but nothing to write home about. I would say 80% of the time I have tried to blow a hole in a wall with my grenade launcher it doesn't work. Maybe I'm just unlucky, but it seems like single-player had a much more destructible environment and that multi-player suffers from too many invincible structures. The system of showing you enemies on the map is a bit gimped as well. I think that an enemy appears once he has shot a bullet, like in CoD4, but for some reason you can then track the person for 30+ seconds as they run halfway across the map. I vastly prefer the realistic gunfire indicator in CoD4 over this sticky tracker.
At launch there is only one multi-player game mode, which is pretty much a basic attack and defend team-based game. There has been notifications that they will be releasing another game mode soon, but I personally feel that even 2 game types doesn't even come close to what should be in a title that clearly considered the single-player campaign a side note. This was supposed to be a multi-player gamer's dream title, and I can't, for the life of me, figure out why. Why would I play battlefield when I could go play CoD4 or Halo3 and have my choice of 10+ game modes? This is just raw laziness in my opinion. |
Graphics
Nothing incredible, but not too shabby either. The environments really look like torn up battlefields.
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7.0 |
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Sound
One of the first things I remarked about Battlefield: Bad Company is how incredibly real the sound of everything around me was. Bullets whizzing by and explosions alike have never sounded so good.
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10.0 |
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Gameplay
Being able to blow up any given wall was a pretty damn cool decision. It makes the game much more exciting to attack, and much more terrifying to defend.
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7.5 |
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Originality
Despite having some very cool wall-destruction action, this is standard fare FPS gameplay. The dialogue is not nearly as funny as I was lead to believe, and the story is completely uninspiring.
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6.0 |
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Interface
Nothing great or bad to say about the interface design. It does the job.
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6.5 |
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Fun
This was a pretty good romp to run through, but I wouldn't do it again.
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6.5 |
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Lasting Appeal
Once you're finished with the single-player game online may entertain you for a while, but you'll quickly realize you have at least a half-dozen other online games that offer up a better experience.
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4.0 |
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Overall
"Battlefield: Bad Company" is a pretty fun game, but as a hardcore gamer you will be very annoyed that you spent your money on this title. It lacks polish, it feels rushed, and just doesn't play as well as many of it's competitors do. I would try and get your hands on it for 30 minutes, if possible, just so you can see all the awesome environmental destruction, but that isn't enough to carry this game to a purchase recommendation.
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6.8 |
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