Battlefield: Bad Company 2 – Review

Please note this is a review of the single player campaign – Battlefield: Bad Company was one of my favorite first-person shooters of 2008, the game featured some great game mechanics, including the destructible environments and gameplay variety. This along with some great in-game humor and memorable characters made it a stand out title.

That was two years ago and developers DICE – EA Digital Illusions CE – are back with its sequel Battlefield: Bad Company 2, a game, that for this gamer has an awful lot to live up to.

You are Private Preston Marlowe, a young man who keeps company with some of the coolest dudes in the war genre, his own ‘bad company’. I’m going to skirt around the story a little here, because as you know if you’ve read one of my reviews before, I loathe giving away game stories, as these are much more fun to discover yourself. In this title, you and your US military squad are tasked with finding a super secret and deadly weapon, whilst also dealing with the fact those pesky Ruskies are once more causing havoc. Your squad consists of a group of smack talking hard asses and they haven’t lost their humor from the previous title, though much of the dialogue seemed to have been cut back and polished, leading to more realism.

The initial level of this title is a treat and fans of the original Call of Duty titles will probably squeal with delight, it’s a brilliant start to an astonishing title. It won’t take long for you to grasp the control scheme, though the act of running did at points feel rather clunky. You run, hide, gun and as this is Bad Company, walls and cover objects don’t always remain. This sort of destruction lends a whole new level of panic to the genre, as you at times scurry from building to building as yet another is left in tatters behind you. As well as the usual run and gun, there is also plenty of vehicle action, some of which feel clunky, some of which is insane fun.

Your squad are a cool bunch of guys, but that’s it, they’re all guys, This part of the game was recently discussed here at ThumbBandits, so we won’t go over it again, suffice to say this title would have been all the better had a new squad member arrived in the form of a kick ass military chick, who knows how to shoot and talk smack with her band of brothers. As far as female involvement in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 goes, forget it, this is a grunt fest. That being said the actual squad mechanics in this title aren’t too bad, with your macho crew rarely getting in the way or doing something that was completely frustrating.

What is a squad without its arsenal, well they’re just a bunch of men running around in camo together. In terms of weapons Battlefield: Bad Company 2 features a multitude of destruction hurling accoutrement, from your standard SMG’s, to RPG’s and of course mounted and vehicle based weaponry.

Graphically Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is a gorgeous looking title with only a few texturing issues, most notable at times some pop up. Environments are for the most part fairly lush, but where the game truly excels is in its “Destruction 2.0″ system, that sees many parts of these environments obliterated as you play. As mentioned this level of destruction really ads to the frantic nature of some levels and also makes for some fun ways of taking out enemies, with you being able to essentially blast their cover away. In some ways this title reminded me a little of the frantic nature of “Black” a game released by EA and developed by Criterion, which released back in 2006.

Anything really wrong with it? A few little things yeah, the loading sequences between levels, where the screen goes black and you tap for fingers waiting for the next level tends to throw you out of the game, it’s a shame these couldn’t flow a little more seamlessly. Running by clicking in the thumbstick could probably have been handled better and the game crashed twice when I thought it was loading. Finally no female character yet again, you’d think we’d be used to this sort of treatment by now, but it still manages to grate a nerve and bring down a super game. Female non representation aside, these are minor annoyances in the grand scheme of things, but worth noting.

Overall Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is a brilliant game, only really suffering in single player due to a fairly short campaign (around 6 or 7 hours). As far as environments, graphics and sound goes, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is a wonderful title, with few issues. The snarky humor and clever characters are let down only by the lack of a female badass, recently talked away by producer Gordon Van Dyke because it’s too hard to put women into games and would take away from other areas of the game, like destructive walls. As lame as this was / is Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is still a sweet little game and we can but hope that Bad Company 3 will feature a Vasquez styled badass, who doesn’t need to move any differently to the other characters (as also suggested by Van Dyke).

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