Well I’ve had this now for about a week and I‘ve played through a fair bit of the single player as well as many hours on the multiplayer and I have come to some fairly distinct conclusions. To recap exactly what we’re dealing with here I’ll go over the basics. Battlefield is a FPS that has been renowned for outstanding multiplayer for many years. This instalment places us in a modern age, in an area familiar to anyone who has turned on a television in the last 50 years, Eastern Europe. The idea behind Bad Company is that you are a new member to the worst regiment in the army B Company. Usually confined to cannon fodder B company get all the dirty jobs on the front line of this particular war on terror. In Three Kings style the troops find a mass of gold and decide to take their soldering rights and loot and pillage. The game follows along this plotline fairly heavily and it has even infiltrated the only game mode in multiplayer. In cinematic style we follow the squad of four men into battle. All of the characters are well played by the motion-captured sprites and voice artists and there are some genuinely funny lines and scenes included in the single player campaign.
Before we get onto the good stuff and stab some people in the face with multiplayer there is one dramatic new addition to this FPS. The new Frostbite engine is a site to behold. The basic idea is that 95% of your sandbox (or playable area) is destroyable and this includes trees, the ground buildings everything. It a very impressive first usage of this new software and I for one don’t ever want to go back. The joy that I receive in running up to a hidden combatant blowing a hole in the building then shooting him in the face is really some of the most fun I’ve had in gaming for years.
The multiplayer mode as it stands is only one mode Gold Create (where one team defends some cases of gold and one team attacks) and this can get a bit repetitive. I want a team deathmatch or free-for-all where I can get in amongst everyone and cause some havoc. Reportedly there is an xbox live update due soon that will give us a new mode but I am yet to see any releases, and there are definitely no reports of a Kill Cam which I am sorely missing. The skill of some players, along with the incentive for strangers to work as a team (and penalties for team kills) is fantastic and the various vehicles dynamically change the battlefield and the way you play the game.
Saying all this though remember that this is the first game with this new architecture and the new Unreal engine is set to have similar possibilities, so it is a little rough in parts. Some of the breaking of trees is very modular compared to the chaos of blowing up a building and it is quite choppy when there are multiple people in tanks, or in a heated firefight, but it is fantastic fun.
8.5/10
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