It's been a long time since I've done a review, kinda bad since I'm supposed to be the Editor-in-chief of this project. Any who, my review is of Battlefield: Bad Company, a modern warfare FPS set during a fictional war.
My first mistake walking into this game was expecting something like CoD4, when in reality the only things that Bad Company and CoD4 have in common is the modern wartime setting, and them being FPS's. In terms of how the action plays out, and some of the other unique gameplay elements (which I'll get into later) really set Bad Company apart from the other modern warfare shooters on the market. Once I got over that Bad Company is not, and will not be like CoD4, I not only started liking the game, I all out fell in love with it.
For the gameplay, there isn't much new here, but Dice did a few things differently than most of the other FPS's on the market right now, particularly in the area of health. Most FPS's since Halo use an auto-heal feature, if you get near death, all you need to do is get to cover for about five to ten seconds and it's like Jesus himself healed your wounds with his hands. Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate that set up since I hate having to find health vials, or medi-packs half-way through a level, however, it does seem to really simplify the game quite a bit. What Dice did with Bad Company is kind of combine both ideas, instead of healing automatically, you just need to tap the L2 button once to get to a "Health Shot" which replenishes your health completely. I especially liked this method because it meant that I still needed to actively keep an eye on my health, which during heavy firefights could make for a challenge.
Another major difference with this game that most don't feature is the near fully destructible environments, someone hiding from you? Shoot a grenade at the wall and take away his cover. Especially fun when you get the ability to call in artillery fire, or air strikes, though, the inner-walls of buildings seem to be inexplicably tough, I'll let it slide though. There are a few more features I'd love to go over, but I'll move on.
Fun gameplay mechanics aside, easily the best part about this game is the story, it's simple, straight-forward, and best of all, enjoyable. You are in Bad Company, a squad of soldiers who have done something so wrong that they are considered to be expendable. The first few segments have you following orders for the US Army on some really unfair missions that no four-person squad should be able to handle. At the end of the very first mission, we get a taste of what is ultimately Bad Companies primary goal in the game. They find a body of a mercenary whose company gets paid in gold bars. So ultimately they set off to find as much gold as possible, at one point in the story, they go AWOL, and gets abandoned (but still used) by the US Army, and that's as far as I will go for the actual story, because what good is a interesting story without some good characters to go with it?
Every Protagonist character in this game is enjoyable, the gal on the radio has some really good lines, the President of a random country was fun in the game, and of course the four gentlemen in Bad Company are very well written and acted. They are the absolute strongest element to this game.
However, not everything is sunshine and rainbows for this game, there are some very critical faults to it. The first being that it is tragically short, somewhere in the area of 7 hours to beat the game for me, I do intend to play it through again so that I can collect all of the guns and find the crates of gold that I missed first time through, but even so, the game could have been longer. Another major flaw in the game is the poorly implemented vehicle controls, one of the strongest things about the multiplayer Battlefield titles were the vehicles and how they handled, I'm not sure why it wasn't able to be carried through into this game, most ground vehicles were okay once you got used to them but there is a segment where you are flying a helicopter and I found it to be almost unplayable. The AI is also depressing in the game, for both enemies and your comrades, you as the player is always pushing the progress despite your leader being right there. Also, visually the game leaves a bit to be desired, but I'll chalk it up to them setting up a destructible world.
Overall though, this game was a delightful surprise for me, and I hope to see these characters again in a sequel soon.
Battlefield: Bad Company: 8 out of 10
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