Battlefield: Bad Company (PS3)
Your squad is straight out of Central Casting: the tough redneck, the Bronx schlub, the black sergeant. During the rare times you're not just a voice-over or a camera POV, you're the sensitive new guy. In the early exposition, the squad explains how they're all loveable rascals. The sergeant notes that he's three days from retirement. "So, we'll pretty much be playing it safe from here on," one of them summarizes.
alt="Building renovations" />I'll say. As a single-player game, Battlefield: Bad Company plays it safe, tired and familiar, without a single notable moment, character, set piece or cut scene. It even ends with a boss battle against a helicopter, which is the videogame equivalent of the developers just throwing up their hands and saying, "I've got nothing?"
The basic schtick is loveable ne'er-do-wells meet Call of Duty, with neither working very well. Nearly every single "funny" moment falls flat on its face. It's kind of cute to see the two non-sarge characters goofing off in the background during cut scenes, but paper-rock-scissors animations can only get you so far. The dialogue is under-written and uninteresting, consisting mostly of one of the two comic relief characters saying something unfunny and the sarge then telling them to can it. A painfully unfunny character with an accent shows up late in the game, mincing through a few cut scenes.
Because the characters are chasing gold, the story grasps at a "Three Kings" style of war movie/heist flick. This is used partly to explain why you're a modern squad alone against hundreds of bad guys. Your teammates are strangely invincible and they're happy to stand around in the open getting shot to prove it. They help by drawing fire, but otherwise, they're as good at killing bad guys as they are at being funny. There is a noticeable spike in difficulty level at the end of the game when you have to play without your teammates, at which point every artificial intelligence soldier is shooting exclusively at you.
alt="Soldiers" />We're here all week, folks. Try the veal. And don't forget to tip your waitress.
The "Three Kings" angle also drives Bad Company's hollow collecting concept. If you bother to search the maps, you can find gold bars that unlock, well, nothing really. Similarly, picking up enemy guns unlocks nothing. The very next mission will reset you to the default gun and you'll never have the opportunity to select the guns you supposedly unlocked. This would have been a great opportunity for Sony to get some mileage out of the PS3's new trophy system, but no such luck.
As for the Call of Duty influence, Bad Company squanders any cinematic appeal by simply spawning uninspired AI soldiers in clumps around the map. In many instances, you'll literally just drive around them. The game seems to recognize this, so in order to force a bit of a challenge, it'll sometimes shunt you through heavily defended chokepoints. Most of the time, however, the firefights are battles of attrition you'll win by virtue of the fact that you can retry as often as you want. With only a few rare occasions, killed bad guys don't respawn, so it's just a matter of time before you'll brute-force retry your way to an objective.
alt="Bad Company soldiers" />The men of Bad Company are here to kick ass and tell jokes, and they're all out of jokes. Well, funny ones, at any rate.
The main selling point for Bad Company is the destructible environment. But don't be fooled: It's all very tightly controlled. You can blow out the pre-scripted portions of a building, but that's it. You're not going to be able to drive a tank over a house, collapse a roof onto a room full of bad guys, or knock a steeple over where a sniper's taking cover. You don't destroy buildings so much as change them. Here's a house; now here's the same house with a wall missing.
As anyone who played X-COM can tell you, destruction is about breaking rules. But Bad Company is about carefully scripted rules, not to mention gratuitously placed exploding barrels to make sure you can knock out walls during the course of normal shooting, or if you happen to run out of grenades. In other words, when it comes to getting us to where X-COM was 15 years ago, shooters are no closer than 2001's Red Faction, which had carefully scripted destructible bits.
alt="Southern exposure" />This is one way to get a little southern exposure into your living room.
The gunplay is suitably loud and overbearing. The weapons have heft and a solid sense of kick (not so for the bullets, considering how many the typical enemy will shrug off). In fact, given the amount of recoil and muzzle flash, and the size of the gun models on screen, the mere act of firing these guns is often as spectacular as blowing the scripted wall out of a building. With gunfire this dramatic, who cares if you're hitting anything? It makes for some impressive fireworks, what with all the smoke and debris. The sound in particular is excellent. If sound design was gameplay, Electronic Arts would be the last game developer you ever needed.
Although it looks a little better on the Xbox 360, the engine does a good job presenting large open environments, and a cinematic filter gives everything a desaturated grainy look. This is actually at odds with the attempt at lighthearted comedy. Bad Company feels like a game engine with an attempt at comedy paradropped in after the fact. The one inspired moment during the single-player game misses its potential. During the battle to a despot's palace, you have to cross a golf course (with drivable golf carts, natch!). But instead of fighting with tanks and small arms across carefully manicured greens, this golf course is made of carefully manicured olive drabs. The one time when Bad Company's artists and its sense of humor could have created a wonderful bit of cognitive dissonance is lost in a wash of dull color.
alt="Soldier" />What Bad Company needs is an attitude adjustment. On your part. If you take the marketing seriously and approach this as a wacky, tongue-in-cheek Call of Duty, you're going to be rightly disappointed. But if you regard this as yet another entry in the Battlefield series -- namely, as a multiplayer game and not much more -- it's actually quite good. The sole multiplayer mode, titled "Gold Rush," channels a team of attackers through pairs of objectives, with very little lateral room to move. The attackers are constantly and insistently butting heads with the defenders. What's more, you're automatically dropped into a squad where you can respawn after getting killed. You're rarely out of the line of fire for more than 15 seconds. The result is nothing if not fast-paced.
The developers at DICE have come a long way since the original Battlefield 1942, and their experience shows. There's a lot of variety in the balance of classes, the different vehicles, and the style of the maps. The "destructible" terrain looks wonderful at fiercely contested choke points, with ruined buildings, craters in the deformable terrain, and jagged tree stumps. In online games, this feature of Bad Company finally comes into its own, as limited as it may be.
alt="Camouflaged Soldier" />Unfortunately, this is a nuanced game and the documentation is pathetic. It looks like EA spent more on a full-color advertisement for Mercenaries 2 than they spent on the manual. The ad is printed on card stock that almost makes it thicker than the manual, which explains very little of Bad Company's feature-rich multiplayer game. There's nothing about the interplay of the specialist and demolition class, nothing about the HUD symbology for the support class, and no information about unlockable gadgets like mines, mortar strikes and sensors. Brace yourself for a pointless learning curve when you go online, where you'll find plenty of people with no idea what they're doing. There's also no way to host your own game, much less browse servers. The PlayStation 3's lack of friends features makes it hard to tell who on your list has the game, but if you happen to be online at the same time as someone who's also playing Bad Company, you can form a squad with them. Overall, the online component is very "hands off, we'll take care of it all, you just jump in."
A system of unlockable weapons and items works similarly to Battlefield 2142. This is an effective way to get people hooked (i.e. addicted), but it also robs the game of some variety. A lot of each class's functionality has to be earned by ranking up and spending unlock points. You're not going to want to try different classes when it means taking away the wonderful toys you've earned and starting at ground level again. Actually, maybe this will make you play even more. It depends on what kind of gamer you are.
Furthermore, Electronic Arts is using this system of unlockables as an incentive to register personal information, pre-order from retailers, buy its other games, and drive traffic to its Web site. EA is even selling some of the weapons; if you pay extra money for the special edition, it comes with the advanced weapons already unlocked, effectively bypassing the 20 or so hours it would take to rank up and unlock them normally. It's an utter disgrace to see DICE's game design used to shamelessly further EA's corporate strategy. While Bad Company is indeed a very good multiplayer game, it reeks of EA's mercenary money-grabbing. When you consider Bad Company from this angle, it's hardly surprising that the single-player game is about a bunch of unfunny clowns doing stupid things to get gold.
This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.
