A Couple of Gamers

New Releases: Bad Company 2

Posted on Feb 28, 2010 by Dave in 360, PS3

Dave: This is a look at Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for Xbox 360 (also available for PS3 and PC). For context, I’m a fan of FPS games. I did not play the original Bad Company, but I have played and enjoyed most of the other games in the Battlefield series. Lori had little-to-no interest in playing or watching me play this title (having already recently played other similar games), though I did catch her laughing at some of the dialogue.

Much to Lori’s chagrin, I’ve cut short our virtual trip to Renaissance Italy to return to modern times so that I can point a gun at things in Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the latest big modern military first-person shooter.

This time around, the soldiers at the wrong end of the barrel are Russian military—again showing that, when they want a conventional military adversary, game developers seem most comfortable creating a sort of neo-cold war gone hot. I should note that I’m only vaguely aware of the fiction established in the original Bad Company, and this sequel does very little to help me out with this—other than to show swaths of red and tiny Russian flags growing to cover regions on a map that I’m quite certain aren’t part of present-day Russia.  That said, I play these games for the action, not the plot, and I’m not too keen on sitting through a lot of unnecessary exposition anyway.

Dave: If rumours that the next Call of Duty will actually take place during the cold war era are correct, I’m not sure if we’ll be able to tell the difference… other than that they’ll be calling the enemies “Reds” and they can use trendy Soviet iconography.

The single-player campaign centers on the exploits of Bravo (“Bad”) Company, a squad of four US soldiers who, in the first game, went looking for gold (in a similar vein to the protagonists of films like Kelly’s Heroes or Three Kings). I’ve gathered from various game previews and marketing materials (rather than the game itself) that, having been reeled in, the crew is forced into military servitude once again. The members of Bad Company are a fairly colourful cast, where the player fills the shoes of Preston Marlowe, more-or-less the straight man of the bunch. Compared to most FPS games, the other three characters (Sarge, Sweetwater, and Haggard) offer a decent amount of entertaining dialogue, both in cutscenes and gameplay—the latter mostly during the slower moments between the more common frenetic combat sequences.

Lori: “You had me at ‘interesting.’” That still makes me chuckle. Evidently, it doesn’t take much to amuse me.

And the combat in Bad Company 2 is about as frenzied and chaotic as is comes. A key feature of the Battlefield franchise in recent years has been fully destructible environments, and they’re not afraid to show off that feature throughout the campaign.  Buildings explode and collapse, trees and wood fences splinter and disintegrate—in turn filling the air with dust, smoke, and various flying objects. Of course, the most relevant flying objects are still bullets, and the gunfire zings and pops with great effect—aided in no small part by some superbly deep and detailed sound effect design. The sights and sounds of battle are all there, and they’re usually coming at you from all angles. No doubt: when it comes to graphics and audio, this game is at or near the top of the pile when it comes to console games. From start to finish, I was treated to rich settings, impressive set pieces, and glorious expansive backdrops unmatched by most games. It may not have a particularly compelling narrative, but the action is in no short supply.

Indeed, BF:BC2’s campaign has got all the spectacle that military shooter fans have come to expect, but that’s also a clue to what is, perhaps, my only letdown: that I’m starting to get the feeling that I’ve done this all before. After all, it was just a few months ago that I was the nervous gunner in a Humvee convoy, or that I watched as jets streak through the sky to strike at entrenched enemy targets, and that I was faced with the threat of Russia invading the continental US—all in another game: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Of course, the developers of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (DICE) deserve a ton of credit for meeting the extremely high bar set by the developers of Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward), but the reality is that I played this one second, and the highs didn’t seem quite as high this time around.

Dave: As a note, I played the campaign mode on “Normal” difficulty and, as an FPS veteran, it was not particularly challenging (when compared to MW2 on the middle “Hardened” difficulty, for example). It took about 6-7 hours to complete at a fairly leisurely pace (I didn’t “review-rush” it). There’s no doubt that some may find that short, but I was reasonably satisfied in knowing the amount of content and entertainment present in multiplayer (next page)…

Pages: 1 2