Game Review: Battlefield: Bad Company

Imagine a buddy movie in the army, and you have an idea of what to expect.

Genre

First person shooter

Platform

Playstation 3, Xbox 360

Story

Welcome to Bravo Company, called Bad Company, since it’s the squad where the army drops misfits and rejects. The player controls Preston, who — along with Haggard, Sweetwater, and “Sarge” — are on the front lines in a war against Russia, who’s invading Europe.  No, it’s not based on current events.

However, the Russians are using mercenaries, and they’re all paid in gold. And our intrepid heroes occasionally go off the reservation for a battlefield bump in pay.

Mechanics

One bumper heals, and the other fires grenades. You’d be surprised how often that gets confusing.

Hold the left trigger to zoom on the scope, right to fire — no matter what the weapon is, or where it is. Unless you’re in a vehicle, then the triggers move forward or back. And there are a lot of vehicles.

And every time you die, the action is still ongoing, with all of your progress perfectly intact. There’s almost no penalty for death.  I am so not complaining, especially after playing part 2.

Gameplay

There are so many different types of guns and vehicles in here, it’s really impressive. Not to mention that each area is a vast playground, with various and sundry ways to achieve almost any goal.  There are some invisible walls, but not as many as one might expect.

The player gets to wield almost every time of gun known to man, but the player can only carry one weapons at a time. It makes no sense, but what the heck.  It’s especially fun when you lase a target for Russian artillery to blow up their own positions — it’s a weapon that the game designers must have figured out would make the game too easy, so it’s taken away from you in order to give you target-lasing binoculars, so you can guide a JDAM missile onto tanks.  The player gets to drive tanks, and helicopters.

It’s also nice to have teammates on your side who are actually good for something. They’ll suppress enemy fire, they’ll even deal with some of your enemy.  When they say they’ll cover your flank, they’ll actually do it. Which is a nice change, really.

And did I mention that the entire environment is destructible?

Music/Graphics

The graphics are actually quite nice, and on par with the cut scenes.  The soundtrack isn’t bad.

Morals/Appropriateness

We’ve got an interesting rogue’s gallery here. Preston is straightlaced, Sarge is always five minutes away from retirement, Sweetwater is brainy, and Haggard is a little crazy.  All four of them have an eye on the mercenaries’ gold, even to the point where they accidentally invade a neutral country. They’re good guys, just underpaid … like everyone else in the army.

However, there’s also a point in the story where the army hangs them out to dry in the middle of hostile territory. So, use your own judgement here.

The blood is …. to be honest, if there’s blood anywhere, I didn’t notice. And the language issues are PG-13 — with a singular use of sh!t and another singular use of G**d**nit in the entire story.  Which is surprising… especially when the next game overuses every single inappropriate word in the dictionary. But that’s the next game.

Community/Multiplayer

Not anymore. When this first came online, sure. Nowadays … probably not.

Addiction Danger

Slight. It’s easy to fall into this game. The story works, the characters are likeable, but there are some points where the difficulty spikes, and there’s a lot of player death. That might be counteracted by the lack of consequence for player death.

Problems/Ending Comments

You know what? I liked this one. I would put this up against any Battlefield game since.

ESRB Rating:  T for Teen.

My Rating: 8/10, a great game. Very enjoyable.

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Copyright 2015 John Konecsni