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By Keith B (14th Jul 2008)The latest arrival in the long line of Battlefield games brings destructible environments to the table, along with a serious awards system and, would you believe, a pretty funny single player campaign

War games are two a penny these days but there are a few of distinguished lineage that stand out: Call of Duty, Medal of Honor (maybe) and Battlefield. The latter made its name on the PC through games like Battlefield 1942 (with multiple expansions), Battlefield Vietnam and Battlefield 2142. It’s had a run on consoles before with Battlefield 2: Modern Combat debuting there. It’s not considered in the same ilk as Call of Duty but after Bad Company, it ought to be.

Bad Company borrows from the same train of thought as Call of Duty, in the ratio of single player it gives you to the massively popular multiplayer. The brains behind Bad Company got a lot of thigns right, and the first of them was giving people substance in the single player mode.

Bad Company is to the Army what solitary confinement is to a prison visit – the worst place to be, in other words. Its members have the shortest lifespan in the Army because they get the worst missions, punishment for deeds done prior. The group comprises you, Preston Marlowe, stuck to the company for some unknown reason. Joining you are Haggard, an explosion addict and general mayhem creator; Sweetwater, the less-than-brave guy with the general voice of reason; and Redford, your Sergeant and basass.

Soon into your career you come across the body of a combatant, to discover he was a member of the Legionnaires, a mercenary group apparently paid in solid gold. A quick search of the pockets produces and ingot, and so begins the long road to steal the gold from the mercs. A mission made all the easier after Bad Company are abandoned by the Army.

What struck me about the game right from the start was the dynamics between the other three members of the squad, because there were actual laugh-out-loud moments for me and that’s unusual. There is a believability to the dialogue, and to the unfolding of the campaign.

One flaw with this approach is that, for the majority of the game, you’re going to have three AI with you, and if the AI isn’t good, it’s going to ruin the whole experience. Thankfully the guys aren’t so inept as to run straight across a stream of your light machinegun fire or under the wheels of an enemy tank, but that doesn’t mean that they’re much use either. They’re not great at cutting a path through the enemy and often you find yourself pinned down by a tower, only to see Haggard standing there blasting away with a shotgun at a foe 200m away with a perfectly good rocket launcher strapped to his back.

The big feature with Bad company is, of course, its online mode. If you’ve played the demo you know what’s going on, although many of the maps lack the scale of the desert-based vehicle map Oasis. The aim of the game is to either defend or attack a series of gold crates. Should the attackers destroy the first two crates, the focus then moves further into the map, giving a new pair of crates to be defended and potentially a new base of operations for the attacking force. Once you log in, you pick one of five classes depending on what you want to do (Assault, Demolition, Recon, Specialist or Support) and get stuck into the combat. The classes all provide something entirely unique - the Recon kit comes with a laser designator for hitting tanks with missiles from on high, and a sniper rifle; Demolition features a shotgun, a rocket launcher, anti-vehicle mines; and Support, probably the most powerful class, features a light machinegun, a medipak (for healing on the go) and a repair tool (for fixing your tanks). Being able to heal vehicles and other players is powerful indeed.

Like all Battlefields of late, the game features a massive amount of trophies, patches, wildcards, dog-tags and weapons to collect, offering considerable reply value without repeating the entire experience like CoD4.
Making an entrance this year is destructible environments, which sounds like a lot of fun. Should you find yourself in a tank without a line of sight to the enemy crate, then make one. It’s possible to blow out walls of buildings with explosives or a cannon, and provides many moments of pure bastardness as you blow open a wall, see three of four enemies crouching around the crate, and your next shot clears the room. Brilliant. But not perfect. You see, you can’t destroy the floors of a multi-storey building and you can only destroy certain walls (most of them, but not all). Also, you now face situations where your tank can smash down walls but gets struck behind a garden gate, because the gate isn’t destructible, but in fairness to the game it’s the debut of the feature and it works pretty well. It does morph the battlefield and provides interesting experiences on just about any map.

Plans are afoot to launch the Conquest game mode in a free update although I wonder why it wasn’t included in the retail copy. There are eight maps to get across and although they’re quite large for the most part, you can quickly learn strategies making rounds quicker. When they launch the Conquest mode they should also look at the squad size and increase it – at the moment you can only have four people in your squad, which borders on lame. The reason being, I imagine, is because if you die, you can spawn onto a squad mate and therefore if you had a squad of 10 people, you’d have to eliminate them all in the time it takes for the first casualty to come back to stop the advance or they’d keep spawning on each other. Still, I want more people in the squad.
Battlefield: Bad Company is a thoroughly well thought out game and deserves credit for it. And with CoD going back to WWII for its next instalment, there’s room for B: BC to become a leading online combat game. Well worth an investment.