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Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is like a do-over for DICE. Better known for ambitious and epic PC multiplayer shooters, Bad Company was its first salvo fired in earnest toward the console market, and while the multiplayer was lauded as fun and different, the single player was considered less successful. With copious notes in hand from reception to the original and a good amount of player feedback from their successful release of Battlefield 1943 on consoles last summer, DICE and EA have returned with a game that feels tighter and more refined online and which offers a grand globe-trotting adventure solo that has genuine character.
Right away, Bad Company 2 introduced me to characters I got to know and like—and who developed as the game went on. DICE convincingly establishes the idea of Bad Company as a dysfunctional family. From anecdotes about their favorite scenes in “Predator” or their favorite Harrison Ford role to their obvious dedication to one another, I felt more invested in the characters than any shooter in recent memory.
The story is less well executed, but it serves as decent enough glue for the proceedings. There are echoes of Modern Warfare 2′s premise in some ways, but the developers seemed cognizant enough of this to throw in several references to the competition (and to frequently poke fun of it in the process). The plot is outlandish, not insulting, and the character work makes it more palatable than Infinity Ward’s most recent offering. This is all aided by really strong visual design by DICE. The environments are sweeping and epic with really great lighting and particle effects that sell the spaces you’re in, from mists in the jungle hills of South America to blizzard conditions in the mountains or dust and debris in urban combat areas. The audio design also helps to sell this with loud, realistic gunfire and explosions, as well as superb voice acting.
Combat has a sandbox sensibility to it. The terrain deformation and destructible buildings combine with some very large spaces to present you with a host of options for each battle, resulting in a great sense of unpredictability. Enemies can (and will) destroy cover and buildings just as willingly as you and your squadmates, and on normal difficulty presented a good challenge that seems as though it’s been toned down from the machine-like precision players complained about in the first game.
DICE has done well to mix up the level design and provide a good amount of variety in objectives, moving players along at a good clip through a pretty lengthy campaign. Certain presentation problems hurt the pacing somewhat, however. The game fades to black as it switches to cutscenes then back to gameplay, a jarring break in the experience that seems like it could have been avoided. At other times, the roaring gunfire and explosions drown out mission dialogue and incidental chatter that I actually would have liked to have heard. There are also sometimes strange visual glitches here and there, but nothing that particularly affected the experience.
A serious lack of checkpoints in the campaign is a more troublesome issue. This wasn’t usually a problem on normal difficulty, but there were particular moments throughout where I encountered a string of especially difficult firefights or on-rails sequences with no checkpoints at all. Combine this with the overall fragility of your character, the vehicles you’ll occupy and the cover you’ll try to hide behind—along with the apparent sale at the neighborhood Munitions World for RPGs and TOW launchers—there’s a good chance you’ll die several minutes into certain encounters and be forced to play the extended sequence repeatedly.
These are minor complaints, though, and these are only problems with the single-player campaign, obviously. On the other hand, it’s nice to see the ways in which the singleplayer game segues gracefully into the multiplayer aspect of BC2. Thus far, we’ve only had the opportunity to spend about four hours or so with the full multiplayer offering in BC2 (including all maps and modes), as well as many more than that with the multiplayer demo EA released on Xbox Live a month ago. Keeping that in mind, I’ll be monitoring the multiplayer environment over the next two weeks for a follow-up assessment of the online goings-on when the game has been fully in the wild for a bit. With that caveat out of the way, the multiplayer in Bad Company 2 is fantastic.
The emphasis on teamwork in every mode doesn’t just require that players work together, it rewards it. There’s room for more than lone wolf-assault types, though there’s a place for them as well. Unlocks and ranking are tied to points, which isn’t anything new, but the support classes get as many points for doing their job (such as throwing out health packs, reviving fallen teammates and repairing/destroying vehicles) as they would for kills. That doesn’t prevent engineers and medics from acting as killing machines in their own right, as I’ve found a lot of success with the engineer’s silenced SMGs. Meanwhile, the combat dynamic of single player remains in effect in multiplayer, as the destructible terrain and inclusion of various vehicles makes things wonderfully unpredictable.
In its short existence, 2010 has seen a procession of great releases on an almost weekly basis thus far, and Battlefield finds itself in good company. If you’ve been looking for a shooter good enough to supplant Modern Warfare 2 as your multiplayer game of choice on Xbox Live, you’ve found it. And with its strong, team-focused gameplay and an ambitious scale, DICE should be commended for working so hard to make single player feel like much more than an afterthought. Bad Company 2 is the best FPS I’ve played in longer than I can remember. While the presentation could be stronger in spots and DICE hasn’t quite gotten the hang of checkpointing systems outside of the PC space, I don’t see myself shutting up about how good Bad Company 2 is for quite some time.
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