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Genre: First-Person Action Publisher: Electronic Arts Developer: Digital Illusions CE (DICE) Players: 1-24

By Keith B (12th Mar 2010)

Whether or not you got that giddy feeling like a mid-March burst of Christmas cheer, perhaps resulting in a resistance to sleep the night before this arrived, will probably depend on whether you rocked out with Battlefield 1942 and other subsequent releases on PC before getting on with Bad Company on a console. The series has been going strong for the better part of a decade, making it one of the most successful multiplayer games in recent years.

While multiplayer is the primary method of enjoying any Battlefield game, the addition of a single player campaign is again welcome, with plenty of work invested into making it a thrilling and fun adventure.

Sweetwater, Haggard, Sarge and the player-controller Preston Marlowe all reprise their roles in the squad that eternally exists in the ‘wrong place, wrong time’. This time they’re not acting for themselves by stealing crates of gold from mercenaries, instead becoming embroiled in a battle to stop a Russian assault on the US using a myth remaining from WWII.

As single player campaigns go, after a slow start, it does build momentum and the humour starts to shine through, with references to other leading IPs both welcome and genuinely funny (“Snowmobiles are for douchebags”). By the end, the memories of missions that set you tearing across the dunes of a desert searching for a lost tanker that vanished in the 40s, or skulking through the jungle undergrowth armed with only a pistol, will become firmly locked in memory. The destruction engine gets plenty of workout as often massive amounts of ordinance are flung at the hapless enemy.

Replaying levels is also a strong possibility, courtesy of collectables scattered throughout. Scouring buildings for the weapons that you can add to your armoury and the satellite uplinks that must be destroyed isn’t nearly as tedious as it could have been. In fact, loading up a completed level to hit it again reinforces the fact that most of the levels are immersive, if lacking a little in the creativity department. Firing incessantly from the mounted weapon of a helicopter is something that’s been seen before, as one example, but just as nobody seemed to care that Darksiders was a complete rip off of God of War, similarly complaining that the basis of many levels from Bad Company 2 have been seen in other – successful – titles through the years smarts of ignorance.



Getting down to brass tacks – the visuals are superb. The backdrops of mountains in the jungles or miles of sand in the desert are often polished, although the main characters in the game are not quite as shiny. On the other hand, the audio is brilliantly done, and switching to the War Tapes option in the Audio menu makes it more so. Reverberating echoes when firing from inside a building, the crunch of a tank over rubble – these are audio cues that not very many games deliver these days.

In a nutshell – the campaign mode is improved in many ways over the first, and is an interesting storyline to play through. Anyone who says it isn’t, or that it’s lacking, isn’t being objective, or fair. There are plenty of scenarios and locations, with gorgeous backdrops and sharp visuals, and the audio is superb.

Getting online though is where it’s at, and in the true tradition of the series, it doesn’t fail to deliver. Two modes are all that’s on offer, and if that seems paltry, fear not, because no two games are ever the same, courtesy of two big factors – vehicles, and the destructible environments.



It’s hard to convey just how thrilling the combat can often get. Bolting into a house to avoid SMG fire is all well and good, until someone blows the walls out of the building leaving your ass hanging in the breeze for the tank sitting outside. Desperate sprints towards armour in the hope of depositing one or two land mines in its path before you’re blown to pieces become gripping feats of reflexes, and often to no avail, but damn if it doesn’t provide moments of selfless sacrifice and, occasionally, fruitful rewards. The destruction engine has been evolved, and while you may not appreciate the finer detail of it when you’re running from a mounted machine gun, the added detail of being able to totally flatten a building into the ground you certainly will. If you hear the metal groaning and buckling, get out.

Boosting this hectic gameplay is a wonderful system that allows squads, working in unison, to unleash unholy hell on the enemy. A four-man team comprising elements of all the classes – Medic, Engineer, Assault, and Recon – can be an incredibly effective combination and has the potential to genuinely turn the tide of any scenario. Adding an APC or tank to the equation brings the pain-making to a whole new level. Hanging back a little as a medic, resuscitating your comrades as they fall while watching for blips on the screen from your Recon guy’s motion tracker grenades is something that rarely fails to provide excitement.

Advancing through the levels brings rewards in the form of equipment and weapon unlocks. The spacing out of ranks, in terms of the time needed to achieve the experience points, helps extend that element of the game beyond what its predecessor managed. Allowing players to apply a whole new level of customisation is welcomed, and offers far more in terms of tweaking your equipment for a more specific role.



My initial reactions to the multiplayer were not too good, if truth be known. I thought the weapons felt light, and although the infinite-run and reload-while-sprinting elements give the player a reminder that we’re not taking ourselves too seriously, once the full swing of combat commences those perceptions fly out the window. It has unlimited run because the maps are often MASSIVE – and traipsing through the snow while struggling for breath isn’t needed as much as getting the player back into the action is.

Repeated server issues have blighted the first week of play. As I write I’ve put in just over 14 hours on multiplayer, and from the seven days since launch, there were two where I couldn’t connect to the EA servers. DICE claim that there has been a 400 per cent increase in traffic from the peak of their previous highest number of users, but it would seem that poor planning had servers down for eight hours at a time.

Bad Company 2 had a lot to live up to, and despite some small issues, it has. A more stable and genuinely engaging single player campaign is bolstered by the most engaging and complex multiplayer in the genre.

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