Acta non Verba

So, I finished Battlefield: Bad Company a few days ago. I suppose I'll tell you what I thought of it, as if my opinion matters to whomever you might be.

I was initially intending to buy Call of Duty 4 for myself, but decided to spend the money instead on a birthday present for my brother. He seemed to be more interested in Bad Company, and it was a game I was quite eager to play myself, after watching some of the trailers. So, Battlefield it was. Naturally, he lost interest in the single-player campaign after a few minutes, so I completed it for him.

My Internet connection is fairly unreliable, and wasn't working when I first tried to take the game online, so I decided to play through the story mode first.

My first impression was that DICE are awesome. The graphics are gorgeous. The trees look like real trees, the tanks look like real tanks, and the people look like real people. The Frostbite Engine's lighting is entirely dynamic - as it would have to be in such a dynamic game. My only beef with the graphics is the smoke effects - although it looks pretty in screenshots, they animate rather poorly, flickering and disappearing in a rather distracting way. It's a minor issue overall, though.

If anything is more impressive than the graphics, though, it's the sound. The Frostbite Engine uses HDR sound, as explained briefly by excited Swedish men here. This generally means that the whole experience is very loud, and I reccomend you buy a pair of fancy headphones if you want to fully appreciate this game. Combine that with plenty of explosions, funny characters and a beautiful soundtrack, Bad Company could well be the best sounding game I've ever played.

The big deal with this game, though, as I'm sure already know, is the destructible environment. The Frostbite Engine can render 90% destructible environments - that's only 10% away from real life. One can literally blast a path through a row of buildings, a la Juggernaut, and even the ground itself can be blown to pieces. If you like destroying things, buy this game.

But, regardless of how much fun it is overall, there are a few issues I still have with the thing.

The game has three difficulty levels. I played through on Hard, and that was still quite easy. What made it so simple was the way that the player's character is completely invincible. Upon losing one's hit points, one is simply teleported to the last checkpoint, and sometimes given a new vehicle. The enemies, though, stay dead. So all one has to do is march into the game, kill at least one enemy, die, repeat, and the level is as good as done, and since the enemies die from so much as breaking a fingernail, anyone can pretty much breeze through the game without encountering much of a challenge. The only time the player does have to restart a level is when they've failed an objective, which can only happen about three times in the whole game. DICE apparently wanted to make these three times really count, because there is one part of the game that is so frustratingly difficult, it will make you cry, not least because the player's AI squad is pathetically stupid. Trust me, they live up to their name.

The great thing is, there are Achievements for completing each level on all three difficulty modes, and, unlike other games, I can't get them all from doing it on the hardest setting. This means I have to endure a large portion of deja vu with a side order of boredom as I waltz through the entire game again, against even less challenging enemies. Twice.

Battlefield has always been about the multiplayer, though, and, although the matches are a little smaller this time round, there's no less fun to be had. It's difficult to get bored of a multiplayer where, upon spawning at my base, I am presented with several armoured cars, a helicopter, two tanks and an artillery gun. Very difficult indeed. All of the problems with the single-player, such as stupid AI and overly forgiving difficulty levels are, of course, not present, although that's not to say my fellow players are guaranteed to be any more intelligent.

So, to draw this dull, rambling excuse for a critical review to a close, Bad Company is an excellent multiplayer game with a surprisingly deep and enjoyable single player experience. I'm quite glad I chose it over Call of Duty 4, now.

Well, I'm sorry this ended up so drawn out. I guess I have a tendancy to ramble on a bit.