Battlefield: Bad Company (Xbox 360)

A solid multiplayer shooter with some unfunny gold-digging around the edges
7/7/2008 6:05 PM | 2 Comments | Page 2 of 3

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.

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.

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.

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.