here comes a point, when playing Battlefield: Bad Company, where you throw away your disbelief that real-life soldiers would act with such disregard for morality, and you start to just enjoy the game for what it is: big, dumb (but oh so explosive) fun.
Sure, it’s really stupid to see grown men, and soldiers to boot, acting like complete morons, but what DICE has managed to do with Bad Company is create a game that is so much fun to play that you pretty much throw away all thoughts of reality and roll with it.
GET RICH QUICK
The game’s premise is quite simple: you play as a dropkick soldier who’s been handballed to B Company, a group of soldiers made up of military misfits the likes of which you’d never actually see in a real army – or perhaps you will and my worldview is completely askew.
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Being completely expendable, Bad Company is soon sent on a dangerous mission behind enemy lines in a deliberately ambiguous European country (I think… it’s all very vague but hey you get to shoot a lot of things), where you uncover a truckload (literally) of gold that’s being used to pay off an army of mercenaries. Not content with facing a possible court-martial, your squad leader Sarge takes it upon himself to make finding the gold and keeping it a secret your squad’s main mission. Thus the single player aspect is borne, and this is actually something of a first for the Battlefield series.
ASPLODE!
The single player portion, whilst nowhere near as immersive as, say, COD4, is quite a bit of fun, but only because of one particular feature: the ability to blow things up. The proprietary Frostbite Engine, developed by DICE, allows
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for map elements to degrade under the force of explosions. What this basically amounts to in-game is that you can now blow holes in walls and barricades to effectively make your
own path.
It’s actually incredibly cool in action and for the first couple of hours all you’ll be doing is blowing shit up and giggling like a little girl – well, that’s what I did! Then, of course, you’ll calm down and realise, like I did, that in the end you still can’t actually destroy a house… just 90% of it. It’s still cool and without this mechanic Bad Company would offer a very different (possibly worse) gaming experience. It’s because of the destruction that the single player succeeds.
OPEN SESAME
Each single player map is actually a very open (and vast) play area. So there is definitely a feeling of emergent options being available
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when it comes to objectives. You will be hemmed in artificially by ‘airstrike zones’, and so too will sequential checkpoints dictate your level progress, but there are quite a few moments during the single player campaign when you’ll have a real blast – particularly some of the tank levels, which take place across vast, open fields and against heaps of enemy tanks and rocket-launching bastards.
The single player portion is a credible effort, and something that you’ll actually be compelled to replay if you wish to find all of the hidden weapons and gold caches. Some negative aspects do arise, such as an annoying ‘hit’ effect which can be disorienting, and to my mind there are far too many explosive barrels scattered about the place, bordering on the ridiculous. Oh, and your squad mates are the most useless bunch of dicks ever, to the point where you should never, ever rely on them. But these mild
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