Review: Battlefield: Bad Company (360)

As you try to protect your gold bullion from the advances of the opposition team, an enemy tank rolls into your base. As you run for cover the tank takes aim and fires. The blast knocks your health down to almost nothing. Luckily, as you make it around the corner, one of your team mates is hiding in the same place. He could give you a health pack. You ask for a health pack. No reply. You ask really nicely. Still no reply. You yell into your headset, unimpressed by this idiots refusal to hand over the goods. Still nothing. You do a little dance hoping to draw their attention to your plight and get the health boost you so desperately need. Sadly, your idiotic dancing only attracts an enemy sniper who finishes you off with a single shot. Welcome to the highly frustrating world of Battlefield: Bad Company.

The Xbox 360 is not exactly short of first person shooters. Every other game on the system involves shooting people and blowing things up. In such a crowded market, a game needs to do something different to stand out. DICE, the developers of this title, the latest instalment of the long running Battlefield series, have clearly recognised this. Out is the claustrophobic street-to-street combat of Call of Duty 4. Instead, each of Bad Company’s levels is vast, but the real twist is that approximately 90% of the scenery can be destroyed. Of course, this is meant to throw up all sorts of interesting tactical possibilities, allowing for enemy positions to be breached in numerous different ways. In reality, the implementation is flawed and you’ll simply find yourself shooting down trees. Vast swathes of each level are covered in trees and whilst being able to demolish 90% of the scenery sounds great, when most of it is trees, it’s really not that exciting.

In fact, the whole single player campaign struggles to really make a mark. Although the levels are vast and, Gamestyle suspects, meant to create the impression of a sandbox style, free-roaming experience the gameplay is anything but. You’re shepherded from objective to objective with a great big orange triangle showing you exactly where to go next. Roaming around each level’s environs might yield a hidden collectible or a random encounter with a few enemy soldiers but for the most part, objectives aside, the levels are fairly empty. Apart from all the trees.

What does remain true, as mentioned earlier, is that how you tackle each objective is a matter for you. To attack an enemy base you can breach a side wall using your grenade launcher and launch a surprise attack, or perhaps take the tank that was left at the last objective and launch a head-on assault. Although the concept of a plotting and executing your own plan might sound inspired, in reality the execution is flawed and broken due to the poor enemy AI. Not only do the enemy have seemingly limitless vision and pinpoint accuracy when shooting at you but they also seem to have an unerring ability to be able to predict exactly which direction you’ll be attacking from and be ready for you. Perhaps the biggest kick in the teeth is that when it all goes wrong and you get killed, you don’t ‘die’ per se, instead you respawn. This means that all the enemies you’ve killed stay dead and makes the task you are about to return to that much easier. There’s no punishment for dying, careful planning and execution of a strategy isn’t rewarded and simply running in to an enemy base, killing a few bad guys, getting killed and then repeating the same cycle again and again until the base is cleared is the easiest way to play the game. You’re not challenged to think around a problem and ultimately, Bad Company is less rewarding for it.

Other problems plague the single player. Although the game looks good and the sound effects are great (try shooting your gun in a building or confined space), the guns simply don’t ‘feel’ right. It takes too many shots to take an enemy down. The damage caused to buildings and structures is inconsistent. Fire your grenade launcher at a building and you might take out a great big chunk of it. Fire it at a brick wall, and you make a gap big enough to fit through and no more. There’s no variety to the way buildings of the same type get damaged, they come down in the same way every time. Although you are playing as part of a 4 man team, there’s no co-op and whilst your team are generally fairly good shots, you can’t control them at all or give them orders. Leave them too far behind and they teleport to catch up with you. The plot is standard FPS fare (Near future, Russian-American war, loose cannons, mercenary gold, blah, blah, blah…) but the characterisation if first class. Some of the cut-scenes are truly funny and the verbal sparring between your brothers-in-arms always amuses.

Of course, longstanding fans of Battlefield will say that the single player campaign is an afterthought and that the real gold is the online multiplayer. Sadly, this is plagued with almost as many problems as the single player and features perhaps the most stupid lobby system of any 360 title to date. Although teams are composed of up to 12 players, they are split into three squads of four. This means that the maximum party size you can form with your friends is four. Even more irksome than this is that you can only talk to the other players in your squad, and there is no form of communication with the other members of your team. For an online game based on teamwork, this is a frankly baffling design decision and leads to the sort of ludicrous scenario described at the start of this review.  There’s only one online gametype, and although another is promised in a forthcoming update, there’s no real reason why this couldn’t have been included on the disc. Animations are too slow. Swinging your knife, for example, takes far too long and leaves you exposed to retaliation. EA have also seen fit to lock no fewer than five items of weaponry unless you jump through certain hoops to get them, including playing the demo and registering online. Why? Some of the maps have glaringly obvious design oversights, including objectives that can be spammed with rockets by the attacking team almost from their spawn point, and AA guns that can be destroyed by artillery almost as soon as the match starts leaving you totally vulnerable to enemy helicopters for large chunks of the game. Vehicles are generally well implemented and do add an extra dimension to online play, although arguably the helicopter is too powerful.

Ultimately, Battlefield: Bad Company is a game that promises a lot but struggles to deliver more than a slightly above average FPS experience. Most frustrating though is the clear potential of how good Bad Company could be online, if you could field a team comprised of 12 friends and talk to each other. In terms of team-based mayhem, there isn’t a comparable game on the 360, but as it stands, the game’s flaws outweigh the positives.

Rating: 6 / 10

Words by Andy Lucas