Wed 5 May 2010
In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the B company fight their way through snowy mountaintops, dense jungles and dusty villages. With a heavy arsenal of deadly weapons and a slew of vehicles to aid them, the crew set off on their mission and they are ready to blow up, shoot down, blast through, wipe out and utterly destroy anything that gets in their way.
As with the original Bad Company, BC2 is a great looking game, and the latest version of DICE’s Frostbite game engine seems fill the screen with more action and to throw more particles around than any other at the moment. Combined with amazingly atmospheric battle sounds (the echoing cracks of gunshot, booming explosions, the yells of the enemy) this makes BC2 one of the most thrilling FPS experiences yet. But, if you played Bad Company 1, you’ll soon realize that the maps that were absolutely sprawling wide open sandboxes have been trimmed down to narrow corridors, and although there are a couple of wide open locations and vehicles feature a lot more than in say, Modern Warfare 2, the gameplay seems to have been modified to be much closer to Infinity Ward’s game. This means that even on some of the bigger maps if you stray off the beaten track by more than a few yards you’ll get an intensely annoying “Turn back! You are leaving the Combat Area!” and a 10-second countdown for you to return to the set path. It feels like you’re getting a slapped wrist for daring to explore and weakens the game’s appeal considerably, although there are still plenty of collectable weapons to hunt for as well as hidden M-Com stations. There are some vehicles to drive (most notably a mission in which you get to control an M1 Abrams main battle tank) but these are few and far between and the narrower maps mean there’s little need for the extensive exploration that the first game required. A couple of vehicle levels play more like races or Call of Duty-style ‘ride-along-and-shoot’ set pieces than actual combat arenas (there’s even a quad bike level that plays just like the skidoo level in MW2). You don’t even get to pilot a helicopter this time, just ride along in a Black Hawk gunship and use the side-mounted mini gun, a mission that could literally have been an add-on for EA’s Modern Warfare 2.
The mostly-unpopular health injector from BC1 has gone in favour of the Call of Duty-style ‘take cover if damaged to recover health’ system. Unlike many I didn’t mind jabbing myself with a hypo to regain health but the new system works better, and the threat and damage indicator (red splatters the screen) is much more effective than MW2’s weird somebody’s sprayed cherryade on the screen-looking effort.
There are a few visual glitches, shadows sometimes de-resolve into a steppy mess, and the horizontal tearing, although significantly improved from Bad Company 1, still rears its ugly head from time to time. There are also a few poor instances of enemies clipping through walls, but they die in a seemingly unlimited number of different ways, take cover when put under fire and are usually fairly accurate when shooting at you, without ever resorting to cheap tricks like CoD4’s “grenade rain” even on the toughest ‘Hardened’ difficulty setting.
Bad Company 2 is a highly impressive game, at times throwing so many particles around that you literally can’t see what’s going on or where you’re going. I initially thought DICE had even managed to lock the horizontal tearing (that Bad Company 1 exhibited so badly) off but it still rears its ugly head from time to time when the on-screen action gets really hectic, or the game engine struggles to draw everything the massive draw distances require. The sound is simply amazing, quite the best in-game sound effects yet produced for a war game, and adds immeasurably to the experience. The multiplayer is where DICE obviously spent a lot of time though, and it shows; a slightly disappointing campaign is made up for by an addictive, progressive, rewarding (and most of all) fun online mode that is better than just about anything out there right now—even if you’ve previously shied away from online multiplayer games I urge you to try it. If you don’t play online games then the solo game probably only ranks as about a 7 out of 10, but the online game sets a new benchmark. It’s no coincidence that EA have made DICE responsible for the forthcoming Medal of Honor’s multiplayer component, it’s sure to be a massive, spectacular hit.