The most explosive barrels in a video game, ever
Traditionally, the Battlefield series has stuck to massive online multiplayer match-ups and shunned singleplayer campaigns all together. Basically everyone loved those games, but Battlefield apparently got jealous of Call of Duty’s crazy success earlier this year and wanted in on that specific FPS action. Therefore, we have been given Battlefield: Bad Company, with a fairly large campaign along with a smaller online multiplayer mode. This game gives you all the excitement you’d expect from a modern FPS, with great production value, but the multiplayer is currently limited and the story is very badly executed.
The gameplay is well executed if a bit limited and uninspired. Your soldier is very nearly always accompanied by three other, more interesting characters, but there isn’t actually any squad interaction at all. You still blast through levels as the lone superhero, even though your character is portrayed as a blank, regular, but surprisingly not too masculine guy. Endless bad guys and their mechanized vehicles stream towards you, and basically only you can stop them. Your friends will very rarely blow up a tank or at least help out on a vehicle’s machine gun. If you like explosive barrels, this game is absolutely for you. There are thousands of them, in different shapes and sizes, outside almost every building to show off the destructible environments the game features. The destructible environments are indeed nice, but buildings will manage to stay up even if all their walls are shot out by a tank, with only corners remaining. Still, the gameplay is fast and fun, with an interesting “life vial” that allows the player to heal themselves basically any time they get a second. It’s not exactly a simulation of combat, clearly, but it’s fun, and I can’t complain.
If you like explosive barrels, this game is absolutely for you.
The AI is a bit slow at points, which is sort of related to the lack of help you get from your friends. Enemies show a similar sort of mental illness, sometimes charging right up to you only to point straight up in the air to shoot. In this new era of consistent console patches, this could be fixed in the future.
One problem with the game that will certainly be fixed in the future is the singular multiplayer mode. At release, only the Gold Rush mode is available for play online, which is basically like Search & Destroy from other shooters. The creators claim that a later patch will add a Conquest game mode, which would be a big help. The multiplayer is fun as always, but another mode would give me a reason to put more time into it.
The production value is unsurprisingly great. The game cost lots of money to make, so the graphics and especially sound are amazing.
On the gameplay and production value fronts, this game is well executed in general. However, the storyline is really awful, though it has some ambition. Like the Unreal series before it, Battlefield wanted a campaign with a story this time around, and not just a multiplayer FPS. Your character has been recently transferred to Bad Company, where the screw-ups of the military are apparently sent to work as cannon fodder. Your squad features three stereotypes (African-American squad leader, nerd/geek with glasses, and stupid redneck, all of which are somewhat offensive to me personally) that constantly tell lame jokes while waltzing unharmed through combat. Your character, however, is stuck between the Gordon Freeman-type mute FPS protagonist role and actually existing as a pre-determined character. This gets really annoying, because he’s not really soldier-like, and he’s not a blank template for you to fill in, but he has no characteristics and doesn’t really contribute to the story as a developing character. On the opposite end, the game has a main bad guy (the Legionnaire) but he also rarely appears and it just seems confusing when the game shows him giving the camera a super-evil look towards the end as if he had killed your mother or something. In other words, the writing or conception or maybe even just execution of the storyline fails. But, the game will sell, and big companies will still continue to not care about hiring actually good writers. Sad.
So, the actual game portion of Battlefield: Bad Company is a perfectly fine first attempt at a singleplayer-centric FPS, but the story makes me sick it’s so badly done. Clearly, not everyone buys games for stories, but reviewers still have fun acting like movie critics and being negative when an actually good story comes around in gaming (Metal Gear Solid 4). Anyway, it’s a very fun, action-packed, exploding-barrel sort of game and there are few reasons not to buy it for the FPS fan.
The Bad: Really awful storyline with no character development, only one multiplayer mode
