Preston Marlowe has been a naughty boy, instead of being court marshaled he is transferred into Bad company. Landing at the base he meets Sarge Redfield along with Sweetwater and Haggard. Bad company it turns out is a place for the rejects and nutjobs. The army hopes they will all get blown to bits and hence solve the problem. Sometimes though the nutjobs actually do a good job, even if they destroy half the country in the process. The four guys spend most of the time alone directed by a female radio operator that Sweetwater has a thing for.
In the wreckage of the first mission the boys discover a mercenaries body and a bar of gold. This sets in motion a chain of events that sees the boys trying for a little private financial enterprise inside their objectives from the Army. However, once the scent of a truckload of gold is sniffed they go awol looking for the gold. By the end of the game we see them invading a neutral country all on their own, getting in tow with an insane dictator and taking apart half of Eastern Europe to get their hands on the mercenary gold. there are many twists and turns, and the hero's go from being official sanctioned warriors to awol terrorists, to being back into the fold, but unofficially, if they are caught then the army will deny all knowledge.
Sweetwater and Haggard are the stars of the show however. The pair of them are huge stereotypes, but they are funny. Sweetwater is a geeky nerd and Haggard an explosion loving idiot redneck. His antics nearly get you all killed too many times to mention. The best one I remember is when he fills a helicopter with fuel in the wrong nozzle, necessitating Sweetwater to clean it out before you can escape the enemy army that is descending onto your position. The one liners and dialogue that Haggard especially comes up with are very entertaining. What is essentially a generic and cliched dull first person shooter story-line is made one hundred percent better by the use of comedy. Who would have thought it would work, I for one enjoyed the characters and dialogue in this game immensely.
Bad company is the latest in a series of games which take the normal FPS gameplay into large free roaming maps, giving you vehicles to traverse the distances.
You start with a quick tutorial to explain weapons and controls and introduce the drill which restores the health of vehicles.
One of the things you realize early on is that there is no real penalty for death in this game. There is a finite amount of enemies in the areas and when you die the only inconvenience is that you might re-spawn at some distance from where you died. There is no amount of lives as in similar games like Frontlines fuel of war. This leads to what I am going to term the Bioshock syndrome.
Remember in Bioshock, if you died you simple re-spawned at the nearest chamber. The damage done to the enemies stayed the same. You could go through the entire game with the wrench bashing the big daddies to death. It would take you about a hundred respwans per big daddy, but it was possible. There is simply not enough punishment for sloppy play. You can run around in the open getting shot to hell without fear. Simply shoot one guy, come back again a few seconds later and kill another, there is no incentive other than personal pride in taking out a hundred enemies before dying or taking out one. This really means that the game will be finish-able by everyone irrespective of their skill. To be fair in one or two areas you do fail and have to restart from the last checkpoint if you loose a mission specific object like a helicopter that is needed for progression.
There is the, now obligatory, arsenal of similar weapons, of course there are shotguns and sniper rifles and assault rifles. You can call down air-strikes, mortar strikes and put down c4 charges. grenades and grenade launchers etc. The vehicles are varied, jeeps, tanks, apc's, golf buggies, helicopters, dinghies. All control well and allow you to switch seats and use guns or drive. Thankfully the a.i. characters don't drive.
The a.i. characters have the usual appearance of doing some shooting but never really seem to be getting anywhere unless you do it all for them. Which is I suppose as it should be. Grenades i must comment on as although they do seem to blow up buildings etc. they don't seem to kill soldiers as easily as you would expect. Although an exploding barrel seems to take out more than it should.
Missions are fairly basic, you start at one point and must get to another, then new objectives until the end of the level. Examples of what you are asked to do include, blowing up a cast of thousands of objects including tanks, artillery emplacements, fuel dumps, radar installations, missile launchers, radio equipment, antenna boxes, anti-aircraft guns, a small town, bridges, and a silo. In addition to these missions you have protecting convoys, storming locations like a palace, harbor, monastery and armory. You get separated, reunited, have to save people.
There are some on rails sequences where you ride shotgun on tanks and jeeps etc driven by others. Some stand out missions include driving a fuel laden truck around a battlefield, which is like driving a bomb. There is also a mission where you have to take down a helicopter after running the gauntlet along a railway line with a crashed train littering the way.
You can blow most walls down, though the structure of buildings can't be broken. However, you can leave them as shells, which means cover for the bad guys is a thing of the past.
There are gold bars and weapons littered around the maps to make you explore for collectables.
The health system employs the age old chestnut of a number counting down with damage from 100 percent. The gimmick here is that you carry a hypodermic that restores full health without you having to search out health packs. You can take damage as much as you want as long as you get out of the way of fire and use the hypodermic. Which is controlled with a flick of a button and a trigger press. This is slightly more sane as a game mechanic than just taking cover and recovering from bullet wounds, though only just.
The checkpoints usually come when an objective is reached. Ammo is freely available from enemies dropped guns and crates littered around the maps.
The a.i. is standard, there is nothing really to praise here. I doubt the a.i. code has been touched since the first battlefield. If it has been, and i am sure it has then it escaped my attention. They use cover, sprinkled with running at you. They don't seem to go into cover just spawn there. This isn't a criticism of Battlefield rather than most FPS games. Compared to Rainbow six Vegas the a.i. needs work.
No bosses as such just storming heavily guarded areas to get to objectives. The helicopter at the end of the game could be classed as a boss battle i suppose.
There are seven single player maps which are huge with realistic looking countryside and buildings. The golf course level stands out for sheer originality, a tank on the fairway should have golf-course keepers throwing a stroke.
Graphics are excellent, especially detailed are the characters, Preston's polygon count easily tallies that of Snake in MGS4, his armor having similar texture style. The frostbite engine looks to have a bright future, with little frame rate drop even when you take the helicopter to it's highest altitude. The graphics are above average, on a par with Call of Duty 4, maybe if the size of the maps are taken into account actually a bit better.
Sound is acceptable with some nice oddball goofy music choices when you are in vehicles and can hear the radio.
After playing through the game on hard i was awarded 415 achievement points. Which is I suppose acceptable for a game with such a large multiplayer focus. The biggest complaint here is that you don't unlock the easy and medium level achievements which cheats you out of 120 points you should have got for playing through on hard. To all developers, never do this, it is a real turn off. If I want to play your game three times I will, making me do it for achievement points you should get for going through on hard the first time won't do it. That said though I will play through this game again.
I don't play enough multiplayer to really review the multiplayer portion of this game properly, so I won't, suffice to say it has it's fans and I am sure it is very enjoyable for it's fans. I simply put don't really rate multiplayer unless it's co-op. Co-op should have been included here in the single player game.
I only saw one glitch, which occured when a tank got stuck under a bridge. the problem was blowing up that tank was a mission objective. I was lost and waiting to be told how to progress, I eventually found the stuck tank and blew it up and the game carried on as normal. I have to say that is the only isolated glitch that i encountered.
Scoring
Graphics 8
Gameplay 8
Story 8
Level Design 8
A.i. 5
Total score 7.4
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