There is a charge for awesomeness (but it’s worth it)

“Hey, what do you think of this thing!?” Whenever someone asks me this I can’t help but think I’m digging myself a hole as, invariably, I’m signing on to take the blame for anything someone doesn’t like about a good recommendation I make. Well, since I’m such a great guy (read: I actually don’t care what you think), I’ll give you that scapegoat; that means to say, “Hey, this tool on the interweb said this was good and I bought it, but I didn’t like it so I’ll blame everything on him!” You’re welcome!!

Read on for my take on Battlefield: Bad Company 2

I’ll start by saying I haven’t played a Battlefield game since Battlefield 2. This was a good game but, in my humble opinion, suffered from vehicles being too present and dominating. Some folks like that and power to ‘em, but not me. I much prefer good ol’ infantry combat that’s immersive and fun. I’ve actually been searching for that game for quite a while now, the closest I’ve come being a mod for Half-Life 2 called Insurgency, which was pretty good but suffered from lack of developer attention. The Call of Duty series came reasonably close as well, but was a lot more arcady and less tactically oriented. So when I picked up Battlefield: Bad Company 2 a while back I wasn’t expecting a whole lot so you could say I was rather pleasantly surprised by what I got.

Let me start by saying I haven’t played through the single player extensively. I gave it a quick try and it felt stale and boring, so I set it aside. For the most part, it played like a Call of Duty game but there was a lot of poorly strung together sequences and places where you just randomly die to a grenade or a tank shooting at you. I can barely tolerate this in Call of Duty but BC2 didn’t have the Hollywood quality scripting to pull me through. That said, while I feel the ball was dropped on the single player side, it was picked up, deftly dribbled down-court, and slam dunked by multiplayer.

Whoever the creative genius at DICE was who decided to put destructible environments into Bad Company 2 was, an internets to you, sir! This may not have been the first game to try modifying the game environment, but I believe it’s one of the best to date. Basically, everything in the game can be blown the !@#& up… buildings, trees, shrubs, walls and so on, which is something games haven’t really done very often yet. Let me give you a few examples of why this feature makes me happy in my little boy parts:

PROBLEM: Enemies are hiding in a building which is providing cover from your team’s fire.

SOLUTION: Blow it the !@#& up!

PROBLEM: The opposing team is moving stealthily creeping through the dense foliage in order to gain a stronger position on you.

SOLUTION: Blow it the !@#& up!

PROBLEM: The enemy defense is too strong, you can’t break through in order to bomb the objective.

SOLUTION: Blow it the !@#& up!

(See where I’m going with this?)

The destructible environments add new spice to your average Battlefield game. Maps change and it really brings meaning to the concept of concealment vs. cover. It should be noted that Bad Company (the game that Bad Company 2 is the sequel for) had this feature, but it was a console only game and seriously, what self-respecting gamer plays FPS on a console?

So now that I’ve blubbered on about this like an awkward teen trying to get in his girlfriend’s pants, what else does Bad Company 2 have to offer? I’ll give you the highlights in bullet point form…

• Rush game mode: Attack an objective and if you succeed, the section of the map you were fighting on closes off and the next section opens up, allowing you to fight across a large space yet stay in a contained area for intensely action-packed battles. There are roughly 4 sections of the map with two objectives per section. This mode can also be played as Squad Rush, which pits two 4-man squads against each other in a condensed version of the normal rush map (1 objective, 2 sections).
• Improved squad functionality:  Very easy to make a team with your friends and you can spawn on any squad member who is alive.
• Weapon/ability unlocks: The usual for games these days, but paced nicely so that you can unlock most of the stuff you need in the earlier levels, leaving the higher ranks more for prestige/bragging rights.
• Vehicle combat: Planes are (thankfully) absent from Bad Company but ground vehicles and helicopters return. That said, they aren’t nearly as overpowering as they were in BF2. A single well placed rocket is enough to down any helicopter and tanks are taken out fairly easily as well. All in all this game feels more like an infantry game with vehicles, as opposed to a vehicle game with some poor bastard who didn’t get in one fast enough and is now cannon fodder for your vehicley rampage of doom.

Now, here’s where we tie into my opening paragraph. There are problems… despite me having an obvious crush on this game, there are things I don’t like about it. We can’t all be perfect… well, I can, but the rest of the world can’t be expected to live up to my excellence, can it? As of the time of writing, my biggest issues are:

• Poor performance: The game is an obvious console port… an absurdly fun one but still a console port. Even good computers see frame rates tanking when there’s a lot going on. Fortunately there’s several tweak guides about the internet to help with this. After spending some time with this, I was able to get the game into a fairly good balance of graphics and playability.
• Poor chat/score viewing: You can’t chat or view your score while dead, which happens fairly often. I believe the chat issue is getting addressed in a future patch, but currently it is a major source of frustration.
• Laggy hit detection: The hitboxes are kind of screwy… they lag a little behind where the model is on your screen since the game tries to predict where people will be based on lag and does a poor job of it. Supposedly this is getting fixed in a future patch and there are tweaks you can make, but it’s still a pain.
• No private games: This day and age it seems companies are doing their best to suck every last penny from you and EA is no slouch. There is no private game option in Bad Company 2 (no internet game between friends, no free dedicated server you can host). Instead, if you want a server to play with friends you have to pay for it by renting it from EA. Actually, you rent it from people who rent it from EA, but whatever. Pricing is not terrible (actually a small 8-man server is quite affordable) but it’s just another example of the changing state of the industry, and it’s quite depressing. That said, having dedicated servers almost feels like being tossed a bone these days, what with the Modern Warfare 2 fiasco and it being damn near impossible to play with a group of friends, so it’s not a total loss.

Despite these faults though, I still rank Bad Company 2 as one of my favourite games. Really, it’s the destructible environments that sell it and the fact that the gameplay is so action-packed and intense. If it weren’t for the above mentioned issues (which really, aren’t really deal breakers and can be overcome), I’d give this game a much higher rating.

Final Rating: 8/10