Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Single-Player Review

02 Mar 2010 at 14:28:23 by Tim McDonald
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I'm of the opinion that Bad Company is the only Battlefield game that went unreleased on PC. I know that there are Battlefield 2: Modern Combat and Battlefield 1943, but as far as I'm concerned the former is a port of Battlefield 2 and the latter is a pseudo-port of Battlefield 1942. The only real Battlefield game that never appeared on PC, then, is Bad Company.

By all accounts, this is a bit of a shame. Bad Company was praised for bringing a decent single-player campaign to the Battlefield universe, and adding in both genuinely likeable characters and a surprisingly destructible environment. PC users, our wait is over: while the first game will likely continue to elude us, we have the sequel.

It's worth mentioning that I'm a Bad Company virgin; Battlefield is one of the series I still consider, in my elitist way, to only be worth playing on PC. As such there are a few things I expected of this, being that it bears the Battlefield name. I figured Bad Company 2 would feature reasonably open environments, it'd be pretty po-faced when it came to story and dialogue, and that I really shouldn't expect more in the way of setpieces.

By and large, I'm happy to be proven wrong.

For those as uninitiated as I was, Bad Company – the squad, not the game – is a group of troublemakers deemed useful but expendable. They're the ones who tend to get the crappy jobs, and after a scene-setting pair of introductory missions, they're set on the trail of a Russian superweapon that could simultaneously start and win a potential war between Russia and the USA.

It's a (hopefully) slightly outlandish plot and it gels well with the characters, all of whom are witty and likeable in their own fashion. Protagonist Preston Marlowe is generally limited to inner monologues, but there's plenty of banter between sarcastic squad techie Sweetwater, slightly slow pyromaniac Haggard, and the long-suffering, too-old-for-this-shit Sarge. Generally, the tone is far closer to that of an action movie than it is a war flick, both in terms of the direction of the story and the reaction of the characters to the situations they're found in. They're all great characters and newcomers will likely grow to love them quickly, although I do suspect that old hands to the Bad Company games may find them growing a little stale.

In a shock twist for squad members in games, however, they're not cack-handed morons. While you're still going to be doing the brunt of the work, your squad is actually capable of killing a few enemies for you or attracting a bit of attention so that you can do the dirty work without having to duck for cover every half-second. They're also unkillable, so you never have to worry about their general health – you can concentrate on yourself and your targets. It's admittedly a bit disconcerting to see Haggard take a rocket or a mortar shell to the face and then haul himself back to his feet a few seconds later when that same situation would result in you either cowering in cover until your health regenerates, or restarting from the last checkpoint, but it's preferable to the alternative of making you escort your squad every mission.

It's a good thing that the squad is not only likeable but useful and invincible, too, because you're stuck with them for pretty much the entire game. While a few missions will see you separated from some or all of the others for a period, the majority of your time is spent working with them. Mostly, this means proceeding down surprisingly linear levels murdering everything in your path, but there are exceptions.

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