Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Single-Player Review Page 2

02 Mar 2010 at 14:28:23 by Tim McDonald
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Before we get to those exceptions, though, we should discuss the linearity. As said above, I was expecting the game to be far more open than it is. While it's definitely not a corridor shooter – you've got far more freedom in each individual firefight than in, say, Modern Warfare – it's probably not what you'd expect from a Battlefield game. Happily, though, you're not funnelled down a path of impassible doors and impregnable knee-high fences; if you're attacking a fuel dump, or a small outpost, or a boathouse, then it's up to you how you want to do it. You can go carefully through each individual building with a shotgun; you can stay at long-range with a sniper rifle; you can carefully work with your squad, flanking and advancing. You can duck around those huge fuel tanks to the left and use them as cover while you advance up on that flank, or you can take the riskier but quicker route to the right, past the crates. Or you can charge up the middle, if you're feeling suicidal; either way your weapon selections made via supply crates dropped into the area, bolstered every time you find a new one, let you play with a lot more variety than you'd expect from a standard shooter, and the destructible buildings add a whole new level to it. You can take out the guys in the machine gun nest with a sniper rifle, yes, but you could just use your RPG to forcibly detatch room they're in from the building. When you realise how much of an impact this has, both in terms of your tactics against enemies and theirs against you, it changes the flow of the game considerably.

The setpieces – those aforementioned exceptions - are where Bad Company 2 stands out, though. While many have been done in games before (and several are very obviously barbs pointed at Modern Warfare 2) it's hard to think of a game that's made them look or sound quite this good. A personal favourite from an early mission involves clearing a path for the rest of the squad by sniping patrols, but to avoid detection you need to fire in time with the thunderstorm that's conveniently going on in the background, and another is the slightly incongruous race against your squad along jungle paths. Happily, that's just for fun; it doesn't matter if you win or lose and there's yet more hilarious banter whatever happens.

And while we're talking exceptions, there are a couple of missions which really open up the environment to you and provide a little more of what you'd expect from Battlefield – one focuses almost exclusively on vehicles, letting you play with a variety of high-tech toys, while the other gives you a wide-open area and a set of objectives that can be tackled in any order. Both of these are easily high points of the game, with the latter in particular showing off how to really make a single-player Battlefield experience.

While it's well paced and well plotted, the game begins to fall a tad flat as it nears its conclusion eight hours in. The last two levels are disappointing, with the setpieces in each failing to live up to what came before, but to be honest it's hard to complain too much when what came before is as good as it is. When that's combined with the jaw-dropping graphical and sound design, you know you're onto a winner.

Simply put, even though it's not likely to be the draw of the package for most people, Bad Company 2's single player mode is stunning. It has few faults, and while you're unlikely to come back to it again and again, it's a joyous experience for as long as it lasts and comes wholeheartedly recommended, not least because it does something that actually feels a bit different for first-person shooters and combines that with sufficient personality and excitement to make it feel genuinely fresh.

And you know what? I like it more than Modern Warfare 2.

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