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 1 of 3

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 voiceover 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.

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 partly used 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.

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 Achievements and nothing else. Similarly, picking up enemy guns doesn't actually let you use them. 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.

As for the Call of Duty influence, Bad Company squanders any cinematic appeal by simply spawning uninspired AI 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 exceptions, 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.