Now, if I were like (earlier) Yahtzee, I'd be starting off this review with a clip of "Bad Company" from the band and the album of the same name. But since I'm not, just imagine it playing in the background, or go look it up on seeqpod. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Still here? Okay. Yes, this isn't the most timely review, but I've only recently come into possession of an XBOX 360, so for the past month or so I've been renting and buying various games. Battlefield: Bad Company fell into the "rental" category. It sounded okay: the first BF title with a storyline like Three Kings set in Russia and the new "Frostbite" physics engine that would let you blow off anything you wanted.
Let's start out with the story, which you've probably heard a million times by now: you play Private Preston Marlowe, a poor soldier who got transferred into B-Company ("Bad Company", get it? Harharhar.) for crashing a helicopter or something. Apparently, B-Company is where the US Army sticks all its misfits, rejects, and cliched movie characters. You have the backwoods hick (Haggard) whose love of blowing things up and dating his cousin got him into trouble. Also is the geeky guy carrying a M249 SAW (Sweetwater) who could've gotten into MIT if he didn't upload a computer virus into the Army's secure network. And there's Sgt. Redwood, the rough, tough black guy who happens to be two days from retirement before the proverbial shit hits the faux-Serbian fan.
So the Army's going to war with Russia for some unexplained reason, and you're all being sent ahead of everyone else because, as Redwood likes to remind you, you're expendable. But after finishing the first level, you come across a team of mercenaries known as The Legionnaires who happen to pay their soldiers in solid gold bars. So after a series of events set off by Haggard's stupidity, you decide to screw the Army and start looking for the gold, while accidentally liberating a Russian satellite nation in the process.
Though you're supposed to be expendable, maybe the army had a secret plan for you, because every time you die you just appear back at your last checkpoint with all your weapons and equipment (and sometimes even the vehicle you died in), while the enemies you kill usually stay dead. Your teammates, while quick to spout off cheesy one-liners, seem to be pretty freakin' invincible as well, which would be nice if they actually did anything useful outside of killing maybe two people each level and whining at you to fix every problem. I began having flashbacks to my time as a poor Russian conscript in Call of Duty 2, where it somehow became my responsibility to fight off an entire German Panzer division by myself, despite there being other conscripts in the house. But I digress...
The gameplay is classic Battlefield style, in that you are somehow trained to use every piece of equipment and drive every vehicle simply by picking it up or planting yourself in the driver's seat. In the single-player, every weapon either comes with a grenade-launcher attachment or comes with standard frag grenades with amusing smiley-face pins. As you might imagine, there are new weapons and gold bars scattered across each map for you to collect, though the gold bars don't really do anything in game unless you're looking for an XBOX Live achievement or two.
Some interesting pieces of equipment the game grants you includes a hypodermic needle that somehow gives you instant full health with no side effects no matter how often you use it, a laser designator that leads a JDAM [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jdam] to streak down towards the target (though you still have to guide it, I found out too late), a targeting system for old Russian mortars (how these things always seem to be loaded, they never tell you), and of course the standard power tool (for repairing vehicles) and a rocket launcher or C4 (for blowing them up). Except for the hypodermic needle (always with you), you can only choose one of those aforementioned items, which means you have to decide if you'd prefer keeping your tank alive longer, or raining hot steaming death upon those who oppose you (I chose hot, steaming death, and I also think I lodged too many parenthetical statements in this paragraph. I apologize for that).
To sum up the single-player experience, I'm tempted to say it was challenging, considering that it seems most of the enemies have uncanny aim while you seem to be leading the special forces of B-Company with an emphasis on "special". Then again, it turned out to be more frustrating, as there's no real penalty for dying other than to yell at your stupid teammates for not suppressing the guy who's shooting you. Some team.
And as for the oft-publicized "Frostbite" engine? It only works in certain areas, kind of like that crappy sequel to Red Faction. You can't collapse a roof on enemy soldiers, and you can't use explosives to tunnel your way under a house. All you can do is pretty much just remove walls and foliage. Even if you bring down a mortar strike directly onto a house, its floors and foundation will still be largely intact. On the other hand, you can somehow make a door shatter into several splinters by scratching it once with your knife.
Of course, this leads me to the multiplayer, where in a move which some (meaning "myself") call "rather dickish," the greedy bastards at Electronic Arts decided to make you jump through hoops to unlock five different weapons or pay an extra $10 (US) for the "Gold Edition" to have them unlocked from the start. I refused to jump through those hoops, and decided to traverse through the multiplayer as it was. To be honest though, I didn't think those aforementioned secret weapons provided a game-breaking advantage, so if you don't want to cough up extra cash, you aren't missing much.
On the other hand, weapon customization is virtually nil in multiplayer. You're given five different classes: recon, assault, support, demolition, and spec-ops. Recon has a sniper-rifle and unlockable laser-designator. Assault carries a rifle and the reusable hypodermic needle (though the effects are slower here). Support carries medpacks, power tool, unlockable mortar targeting system, and a heavy machine gun. Spec ops carries unlockable C4, a SMG, and a "tracer gun" that doesn't seem to do anything. And demolition carries a shotgun, rocket launcher, and unlockable anti-tank mines. You have the option to unlock better primary weapons, but don't even think about making a medic with a grenade-launching rifle like you could in BF 2142. If you can get past the occasional team-killing asshat that lurks around the servers, you might actually find the multiplayer fun, though you're still locked into one of two modes: Gold rush (one team protects crates of gold, the other blows them up) or the now-downloadable conquest (grab the enemy's control points while defending your own).
Overall, if you want the real battlefield experience, just go buy the full set of Battlefield 2 with expansions or Battlefield 2142 with Northern Strike for the PC. The graphics are about the same, and there's a little more customization with your characters and emphasis on teamwork. On the other hand, if you don't own a decent PC and would prefer to fight in a game where a flimsy wooden door isn't an impenetrable barrier, then maybe you'll like this game. In reality, you're better off telling EA to go to something anatomically impossible (how can a corporate entity even go "eff itself" when it doesn't have a body?) and buying Call of Duty 4 instead.
Still here? Okay. Yes, this isn't the most timely review, but I've only recently come into possession of an XBOX 360, so for the past month or so I've been renting and buying various games. Battlefield: Bad Company fell into the "rental" category. It sounded okay: the first BF title with a storyline like Three Kings set in Russia and the new "Frostbite" physics engine that would let you blow off anything you wanted.
Let's start out with the story, which you've probably heard a million times by now: you play Private Preston Marlowe, a poor soldier who got transferred into B-Company ("Bad Company", get it? Harharhar.) for crashing a helicopter or something. Apparently, B-Company is where the US Army sticks all its misfits, rejects, and cliched movie characters. You have the backwoods hick (Haggard) whose love of blowing things up and dating his cousin got him into trouble. Also is the geeky guy carrying a M249 SAW (Sweetwater) who could've gotten into MIT if he didn't upload a computer virus into the Army's secure network. And there's Sgt. Redwood, the rough, tough black guy who happens to be two days from retirement before the proverbial shit hits the faux-Serbian fan.
So the Army's going to war with Russia for some unexplained reason, and you're all being sent ahead of everyone else because, as Redwood likes to remind you, you're expendable. But after finishing the first level, you come across a team of mercenaries known as The Legionnaires who happen to pay their soldiers in solid gold bars. So after a series of events set off by Haggard's stupidity, you decide to screw the Army and start looking for the gold, while accidentally liberating a Russian satellite nation in the process.
Though you're supposed to be expendable, maybe the army had a secret plan for you, because every time you die you just appear back at your last checkpoint with all your weapons and equipment (and sometimes even the vehicle you died in), while the enemies you kill usually stay dead. Your teammates, while quick to spout off cheesy one-liners, seem to be pretty freakin' invincible as well, which would be nice if they actually did anything useful outside of killing maybe two people each level and whining at you to fix every problem. I began having flashbacks to my time as a poor Russian conscript in Call of Duty 2, where it somehow became my responsibility to fight off an entire German Panzer division by myself, despite there being other conscripts in the house. But I digress...
The gameplay is classic Battlefield style, in that you are somehow trained to use every piece of equipment and drive every vehicle simply by picking it up or planting yourself in the driver's seat. In the single-player, every weapon either comes with a grenade-launcher attachment or comes with standard frag grenades with amusing smiley-face pins. As you might imagine, there are new weapons and gold bars scattered across each map for you to collect, though the gold bars don't really do anything in game unless you're looking for an XBOX Live achievement or two.
Some interesting pieces of equipment the game grants you includes a hypodermic needle that somehow gives you instant full health with no side effects no matter how often you use it, a laser designator that leads a JDAM [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jdam] to streak down towards the target (though you still have to guide it, I found out too late), a targeting system for old Russian mortars (how these things always seem to be loaded, they never tell you), and of course the standard power tool (for repairing vehicles) and a rocket launcher or C4 (for blowing them up). Except for the hypodermic needle (always with you), you can only choose one of those aforementioned items, which means you have to decide if you'd prefer keeping your tank alive longer, or raining hot steaming death upon those who oppose you (I chose hot, steaming death, and I also think I lodged too many parenthetical statements in this paragraph. I apologize for that).
To sum up the single-player experience, I'm tempted to say it was challenging, considering that it seems most of the enemies have uncanny aim while you seem to be leading the special forces of B-Company with an emphasis on "special". Then again, it turned out to be more frustrating, as there's no real penalty for dying other than to yell at your stupid teammates for not suppressing the guy who's shooting you. Some team.
And as for the oft-publicized "Frostbite" engine? It only works in certain areas, kind of like that crappy sequel to Red Faction. You can't collapse a roof on enemy soldiers, and you can't use explosives to tunnel your way under a house. All you can do is pretty much just remove walls and foliage. Even if you bring down a mortar strike directly onto a house, its floors and foundation will still be largely intact. On the other hand, you can somehow make a door shatter into several splinters by scratching it once with your knife.
Of course, this leads me to the multiplayer, where in a move which some (meaning "myself") call "rather dickish," the greedy bastards at Electronic Arts decided to make you jump through hoops to unlock five different weapons or pay an extra $10 (US) for the "Gold Edition" to have them unlocked from the start. I refused to jump through those hoops, and decided to traverse through the multiplayer as it was. To be honest though, I didn't think those aforementioned secret weapons provided a game-breaking advantage, so if you don't want to cough up extra cash, you aren't missing much.
On the other hand, weapon customization is virtually nil in multiplayer. You're given five different classes: recon, assault, support, demolition, and spec-ops. Recon has a sniper-rifle and unlockable laser-designator. Assault carries a rifle and the reusable hypodermic needle (though the effects are slower here). Support carries medpacks, power tool, unlockable mortar targeting system, and a heavy machine gun. Spec ops carries unlockable C4, a SMG, and a "tracer gun" that doesn't seem to do anything. And demolition carries a shotgun, rocket launcher, and unlockable anti-tank mines. You have the option to unlock better primary weapons, but don't even think about making a medic with a grenade-launching rifle like you could in BF 2142. If you can get past the occasional team-killing asshat that lurks around the servers, you might actually find the multiplayer fun, though you're still locked into one of two modes: Gold rush (one team protects crates of gold, the other blows them up) or the now-downloadable conquest (grab the enemy's control points while defending your own).
Overall, if you want the real battlefield experience, just go buy the full set of Battlefield 2 with expansions or Battlefield 2142 with Northern Strike for the PC. The graphics are about the same, and there's a little more customization with your characters and emphasis on teamwork. On the other hand, if you don't own a decent PC and would prefer to fight in a game where a flimsy wooden door isn't an impenetrable barrier, then maybe you'll like this game. In reality, you're better off telling EA to go to something anatomically impossible (how can a corporate entity even go "eff itself" when it doesn't have a body?) and buying Call of Duty 4 instead.
