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 3 of 3

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.

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 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' 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 purchased by Crispy Gamer.