Battlefield: Bad Company 2 – Vietnam Review

Some folks are born made to wave the flag! Ooh, they’re red, white, and blue! Man, I used to love that song, and it’s an inspired choice for Bad Company 2 Vietnam’s title screen. It’s catchy, it’s got a memorable melody, it’s from the right era, and it’s got just the right amount of irony and anti-war sentiment to make it the perfect scene-setter.
Then you get into the game and every jeep, tank, and helicopter is blaring either this or Ride of the Valkyries out of the radio. If they aren’t and you’re a passenger in a vehicle, you’ll be sat waiting for a couple of minutes while the driver finds one of those two songs. I fully believe EA’s assertion that this game contains two hours of new music; it’s just that I’ve only heard two minutes of it. Looped over and over and over. And over. I ain’t no fortunate one, no.
Although I lovingly mock it, the way BC2V (as we shall refer to this DLC pack from here on in) establishes setting is important. Certainly, there are the light stylistic tweaks like having period music, different-looking vehicles, and newsreel-style voiceovers to lead you in and out of missions, but the game also has a notably different feel due to the very mechanics. Vietnam is a far cry from the modern/near-future warfare of Bad Company 2, after all, and everything – from the terrain, to the weapons – reflects this, making it feel like a rather different beast to its parent game.
There are five new maps, each with their own distinctive feel, and combined they feel worlds apart from Bad Company 2. The emphasis here is mostly on heavy foliage, easily-penetrated walls, intense chokepoints, and mid to close-range combat. No weapons aside from sniper rifles have zoom scopes; the days of medics providing extraordinarily accurate long-range fire with LMGs are over (or, chronologically speaking, not yet here.) The new flamethrower, in particular, emphasises this design shift: in the bunkers and tunnels in which you’ll often be fighting, it’s a devastating weapon that causes widespread terror, confusion, and death – particularly against clumps of enemies holed up around, say, a Rush mode defence objective.
The maps in question are Hill 137, Cao Son Temple, Phu Bai Valley, Vantage Point, and the newly-unlocked Operation Hastings. Of these, Hill 137 is the visual standout which really shows off the stylistic changes: one control point is set in a napalmed, bombed out section of jungle, covered in tree stumps and charred ground. From there, it moves down towards the shore where the second control point lies, with a third control point lying up a hill, beyond a stretch of jungle.
Jungle is something games tend to struggle with (and the primary reason, I think, as to why we’ve never seen a truly standout Vietnam-based shooter) but it’s handled with aplomb here. It’s never too thick to walk through, but mass vegetation certainly obscures your view and provides excellent hiding places for snipers – assuming they can spot foes through it. Anything bigger than a bush is also fully destructible thanks to the Frostbite engine, so while trees are not necessarily brilliant cover in a firefight you’re never going to see complete deforestation due to gunfire. Whether that’s a plus or minus is entirely subjective, I suppose, depending on whether you’d like to see a map reduced to scorched earth following a pitched battle, or whether you’re happy with some visual cover remaining no matter how intense the fighting gets.
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In Battlefield’s tried-and-tested Conquest mode the majority of the maps are linear, with three control points and a natural progression between them, although all have their own differences. Hill 137 and the jungle map Cao Son Temple don’t have much in the way of vehicles, with only the absurdly dangerous PBR patrol boat present – and even then, that can only effectively cover part of the maps. Vantage Point’s name is fairly self-explanatory, with the middle control point sat on top of a hill that’s a complete pain to assault, even with the assistance of tanks.
Vehicle nuts will certainly be more keen on Phu Bai Valley, a much more open map which showcases everything from the glass cannon helicopters and tanks, through to jeeps and unarmed Tuk-Tuks, although the open-plan nature of the level and a number of hills mean that snipers will also have plenty to do. Finally, there’s Operation Hastings, an updated version of the same map from Battlefield: Vietnam. This is the only map of the bunch to feature four control points instead of three, and it’s certainly the biggest of the lot, with a massive focus on vehicle action. It’s perhaps a shame that there are no maps centred around urban fighting, considering the wonderfully destructive Frostbite engine, but it’s hard to hold it against BC2V when the maps that are present are as well-differentiated as these.
Vehicles, too, appear to have undergone a slight shift. Tanks are still tanks (although some have flamethrowers) and jeeps are still jeeps, but the unspeakably lethal helicopters seem a lot more fragile to small arms fire than I remember, PBRs can dominate infantry with impunity. As with all things, this is relative to the players on the teams – a half-decent sniper or a dedicated engineer can keep a PBR penned in, and an alert medic with an LMG can shoot down a Huey before it can do much damage. Nonetheless, this is a game in which vehicles and long-range combat are put aside in favour of close-up, brutal battles with assault rifles, shotguns, and flamethrowers, and this can make the poor Engineer a little useless in half of the maps.
Whether BC2V is worth your money comes down to a few factors, I think. I question EA’s decision to release this so soon after a new, free Map Pack for Bad Company 2, which added in three brand-new areas to fight over, but there’s no doubt that there’s value for money to be found here. If you’re the sort of person who’s all about vehicle play then, while there are some excellent maps to cater for you, you might find the product on the whole a little lacking; the same goes if you prefer to hide on a hilltop with a scoped LMG.
On the other hand, if you want another five excellently designed and excellently paced maps that will take a decent amount of time to get to grips with (and play very, very differently in Rush and Conquest respectively), an emphasis on close combat and vicious chokepoints, a dirty, grimy feel completely at odds with the more clean-cut special forces feel of Bad Company 2, and one of the few genuinely great games set in Vietnam, then this is most definitely worth a tenner.