Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Review

When I saw the new trailer for Bad Company 2, I really did fall in love with it. DICE seemed to have really found a point with fast and fluid gameplay in the multiplayer aspect of the game with a good mix of vehicles and unique style of maps, that provide a challenge and makes you want to do one more round.

However we have seen this before with a lot of big hitting FPS games which have been released across the platform range. The multiplayer has been brilliant but the single player has been lacking. So how does Bad Company 2's Single player hold up?

Good, well I suppose using one word for this may sound a little vague but it is a enjoyable 10 hours of single player fun. There are a few issues with the way point system which I will explain later, but on the whole the single player is enjoyable to play. There are a lot of set pieces which really raise the drama. For example, early at the beginning of one of the first levels, I remember crouching in a building which is slowly being taken apart by a enemy tank while having to sit and wait for a minute while air support is called to come and help. It was probably one of the longest minutes I've sat in a game trying to make sure I am not getting shot by advancing enemies and making sure I am not in the sights of the tank that is pinning us down, and this is exactly what you will be doing a lot of in this game. A lot of the set-pieces require you and your squad to slowly take down enemies being dug in or you having to hold and wait for backup to arrive.

Some people may feel that this moving from one set-piece to another may get boring but the there always seems to a be a underdog status linked to your team; you are always outnumbered and out-gunned, which gives you a feeling of making the impossible possible. There has been issues which means your team will be stuck to a certain area until you yourself have triggered the checkpoint which can be annoying if you are trying to play as a sniper.

The Single player also has some great on rails moments as well as you are tearing around in a truck having to keep enemies off you as you are trying to get to the next check point. Also as a sniper picking off targets using the lighting and thunder to take out enemies.

With the single player, like I've said, taking you probably only 10 hours at the most, you will be soon having a look at the multiplayer. Just to close on the single player, the campaign was enjoyable and i must say that it was probably one of best FPS single player campaigns i have played recently.

The multiplayer of the game seems to have taken the strength of the original game and taken it a little further and refined it. Like in all of the Battlefield games, a player can choose from a set of weapons kits before each spawn, Instead of the Five which were available in Bad Company they have now reduced it to four - being Assault, Engineer, Recon and Medic, with the original Specialist and Demolition kits now being put together in the Engineer Class. A new feature to the Bad Company series is the fact that there are now experience points which a player can gain allowing them to unlock different weapons and gadgets, some of course may be only available to certain classes and some that are available to any. There is also unlockable items which can be used to modify and customised firearms such as different sights and grenade launchers. You can also customise their soldiers to have different types of armour and combat gear to allow for different setups.

There are your normal modes of multiplayer events such as Squad Deathmatch which is a straight fight to 50 kills. You also have Battlefield's traditional Domination-type which is called Conquest; as long as you hold more than 50% of the flags the enemies tickets will slowly fall and any deaths will remove one ticket from the team. Also more Vehicles are unlocked as control points are held. Even though there isn't really a lot of different modes to play with, there is enough of a selection to keep you busy while a lot of them do centre around attacking or defending control points. The multiplayer is great and is as good as it has ever been, even surpassing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in the mutiplayer department. My only issues with the multiplayer is the fact that regular players will not be able to setup servers themselves and will have to pay a company to set them up a server rather host them on their own.

Then we have two variations of the Rush game-mode, first being accessible by the game's full server capacity of 32 players. In Rush is an attack/defend scenario with the objective to take down two sat-com uplinks, once these two uplinks have been destroyed, the defenders must fall back to their second defence line, once this has dropped the defence have to fall back to their third and final line in order to repel the attackers or die trying. Finally Squad Rush is essentially a cut down version of this where it pits one squad of four against another squad to perform the same objective which is quite intense.

Bad Company 2 has grown from Bad Company which itself was a great game in the first place; the sequel updates a lot of different areas of the game play. While the key feature is the buildings that can be blown up or destroyed, which does add to the fun whether in single player or in multiplayer. The single player is in fact solid and is well worth the time going through with a great storyline and some great set-pieces to really have fun with. The multiplayer is good, however I hope that a few more modes will be added later on down the line just to keep the multiplayer varied.