Battlefield: Bad Company 2 review

This game is so engrossing that it gives the player an opportunity to see how they might act in a real fire fight. In my case dying frequently and cowering in corners, while being showered with wood chips from enemy gunfire that slammed into the structures around me.  DICE really hit it out of the park with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and the way that they set themselves apart in this first person shooter (FPS) was in the immersive feeling of the game. I found myself running through smoking huts unable to see the enemy in front of me, pulse racing, I would jam my eye socket into the scope of my rifle and manage to pick off a couple guys through the haze. Pulling back to change position, I found that the building I had been hiding in was now missing its far end; a result of that last RPG he had managed to get off as I was lining up my shot.

Three words: fully destructible buildings. That’s what this game is all about, every structure can be leveled. Want to cause some long distance damage to that enemy camp? Just stand by an ordnance crate and lob grenades from your rifle (every assault rifle has a grenade launcher) at that massive radio tower. It might take a few tries but damn, it will be worth it when you see the dust cloud it makes. Tired of waiting for a pesky little brat to peek out of the window again? Well just fire a couple shots at that big red gas tank placed on the side of the building for easy refilling, there won’t be any cover left for him to avoid poneage with.  I cannot say enough good things about this aspect of Bad Company 2.  On top of being totally satisfying offensively, it makes for some great gaming experience when the tables are turned. Near the beginning of the game we come face to face with our first tank and it just blows the shit out of every piece of cover in that little snowy town. There is nothing to do except hold out until air support shows up and tells you that you have to mark the target manually.  Every air strike has to be marked by us with our fancy binoculars so that we still feel like part of the action.

This is just one of the ways that the game keeps you in the center of the action all the time.  There are a variety of vehicles, trucks, tanks, ATV’s, all to be driven around by you. Sometimes they’re around and not part of the mission, sometimes they’re placed there obviously to get somewhere. I was impressed when I found that the trucks enemies showed up in were up for grabs. Most things on wheels with a door can be hopped into. There are a couple exceptions that are explained by the truck being up on blocks or something like that --don’t worry; these can still be blown up. You ride as a passenger in a helicopter with your hippie pilot friend a fair bit and are frequently asked to man the miniguns. At one point, you mount an armored assault on a Chilean town as a tank operator; this one is really fun. On the long list of well executed things about Bad Company 2 was the well made variety of the game play. The vehicle missions were challenging and well set up. Around the middle of that tank mission you are called to get out and pilot an unmanned drone to target a whole neighborhood to be leveled with missiles.

It seems to happen often that in a FPS some hero game designer demands some variety in the game and gets it slapped in, the end result being a glorified cut scene or a really mismatched section of game play. This was not the case with Bad Company 2.  It didn’t matter if I was running down a hill, diving behind broken buildings, dodging deafening mortar fire hidden in the jungle picking off Spanish speaking mercenaries or bouncing around on an ATV in the dessert; I felt like a well armed man doing a bunch of different things in one seamless world. Never did I get the jarring feeling of being bounced back and forth between genres, as is so common when a group of designers try to pack different things into a game.

After raving about it for a bit, I must say that anyone who buys this game for the solely for the single player campaign will end up disappointed. I played through it twice and really did like it; however, it had a couple problems. The biggest of which was the length of the story; I breezed through it in a matter of days and was actually a little surprised when the cut scene at the end of the game was setting up the sequel instead of my next mission. Oh yeah, the plot. It was actually pretty fun. The game is set in modern times but, the tutorial takes place at the end of WWII on an island in Japanese waters. Japan has developed a new weapon that ends the war before the Allies drop the bomb and those first minutes of the game are played as a team that is sent in on a suicide mission to discover its power. The rest of the game plays out in a modern, not so cold, war. The Russians are the major threat and they are searching for this lost weapon to begin their invasion of The US. The weapon turns out to be a massive EMP (electromagnetic pulse) device and we actually get to see it in action late in the game. The plot was fun as those things go, even if the cut scenes didn’t really live up to the pace of the game play.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was clearly developed as an online multiplayer game and until you play it that way you will never really know its strengths. This game is in my favorites of the year because of the way that the multiplayer demands teamwork.  From the level design down to the point system, the whole thing is designed with co-operation in mind. The multiplayer battlefields involve all of the great aspects of the game that I described earlier, the destructible landscapes, the vehicles, all of it; only made worlds better by the addition of real people. The game play only gets better when you remove the story.

I will remember this game for the heroic moments it allowed me to have, over and over again. Huddled behind quickly disintegrating cover, I was forced to move as the last of it was hit by an RPG.  All hearing went out leaving the world silent, inducing a strange calm and I knew that we would never win if that tower they had taken still stood. Out of all ordnance except hand placed, remote detonated charges, I called for cover fire and picked a path that kept me out of sight as much as possible. I may have died that day, and come to think of it I have no way of knowing if my actions won us the skirmish, but I like to think of myself as the hero of that battle.