Battlefield Bad Company Review
The easiest girl at the dance?
By Sith Lord Jim:
©2008 Jim McIntyre:
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Battlefield Bad Company would by no means be the prettiest girl at the dance, if the 360′s games were to somehow attend some form of a dance. BF:BC would be the rather average female, whose averageness is more than made up for by the fact that she owns a liquor store, her brother is the president, and her father is extremely rich. Yes all the aspects that are not so brilliant and all the flaws, are by far eclipsed by the sheer amount of fun to be had, even if she is the easiest girl at the dance.
Getting away from my odd analogies for the moment, Battlefield Bad Company places you in the control of Preston Marlow a new addition to the B-Company. In an action-packed story that manages to not take itself too seriously you and your squad members, Haggard, Sweetwater, and Redford desert the army and chase after mercenary gold.
“`Bad Company does many things that are new for the Battlefield series. The two largest of these is the inclusion of a single player campaign with a storyline (BF:MC does not really count storyline-wise.) and the destructability of the environment.
“`Yet even with these major additions BF:BC manages to retain that Battlefield feeling that fans of the series will know and love. These additions rather than destroying the series manage to feel like a natural progression for the series. I mention this as its always nice to see a series moving forward rather than constantly trying to “get back to it’s roots”
Although the story itself can at times seem a bit all over the place, the characters, with the exception of the main villain, are all brimming with personality. Whether it’s the banter of your squad members in the middle of a fire-fight, watching them play scissors-paper-rock, or listening to a dictator talk about his pimped out helicopter, you are sure to be amused by the seemingly fleshed out personalities of these characters. The story is packed with humour and action and is sure to entertain you the whole way through.
Click on any image for full rez view: Makes you just want to go there for holidays – & blow shit up!
The levels are massive with many collectables scattered throughout. There are often many different paths to take throughout the levels to reach your objectives, and many different vehicles you can use to make traveling the large expanse of the levels faster. The collectables do a great job of adding incentive to replay through the campaign and search out villages you may have not visited previously.
Oddly my biggest complaint about the campaign is actually the difficulty, or lack thereof. When you die in Bad Company, you respawn at your last checkpoint with any enemies you killed after the checkpoint still dead. This means that aside from a sometimes lengthy walk back to the action, there is no real reason to avoid dying. Not that dying is all that easy to do anyway. Rather than the regenerating health system that everyone seems to be employing these days Bad Company uses a health meter.
This health can be fully replenished by injecting yourself with a device you have at all times throughout the campaign. This really means that instead of hiding and waiting for your health to regenerate, you hide and wait for your health device to regenerate so you can stab yourself with it again, which at least to me seems to be practically the same thing.
Bad Company is not the first game to use this level of destructability, in fact Red Faction had a heck of a lot more that could be destroyed, but Bad Company is the first of this console generation to achieve this. While some walls seem to inexplicically stand resolute no matter how many rockets you unleash into them, the majority of the environment in Bad Company can be destroyed. This changes the way you play in a fairly large way, as cover is by no means permanent, you are forced to stay on the move.
Of course if you are getting this game it more than likely is not for the singleplayer, but rather for the multiplayer which is just as brilliant as you would expect from this series. At the moment the multiplayer only consists of one game mode, Gold Rush, but there is an extra game mode planned to be released as free DLC in the near future.
Gold Rush places one team as attackers and the other team as defenders. The defending team has unlimited respawns and is tasked with defending a series of pairs of crates containing gold. The attackers are tasked with getting past the defenders and destroying the crates. The defenders can win by killing enough of the attackers to deplete their reinforcement bar, which the attackers can partially replenish by getting the gold crates. When a pair of gold crates are destroyed a bit more of the map can be accessed with another pair of crates available to be destroyed. Attackers win when they have destroyed all pairs of crates.
Like COD4 you earn experience and progress through ranks as you play the multiplayer of Bad Company. There are 25 different ranks with different weapons and gadgets for the different classes that you can unlock as you play. Things like mortar strikes, laser designators, and tank mines can all be unlocked.
Graphically I would not say that Battlefield Bad Company is anything to write home about, even if you do for some odd reason write home about video games. The graphics are nothing amazing, but on the other hand the damage for the most part reacts realistically and is fantastic to watch. The graphics are never bad from what I experienced, but are fairly average considering what else we have seen done on this console.
To attempt to break down my analogy, Bad Company is in many aspects quite average, but certain aspects of this game, such as the destructability of the environment will quickly have you forgetting about the flaws and average aspects. There is a lot of fun to be had with this game. The campaign itself is not long enough to justify purchasing it just for that, but if you have a gold subscription I encourage you to give this one a go. Even if this is one of the easier FPS’s available, it more than makes up for it by being one of the most fun as well.
“8.5/10
©2008 Jim McIntyre:
Click on any image for full rez view: (you got to admit, it looks bloody good don’t it !-ed)
Filed under: Console gaming, Xbox 360, Xbox 360 3rd Party Games, Xbox 360 Game Reviews, Xbox 360 News Tagged: | bad company review, battlefield bad company review, Battlefield bad Company Reviews, Dics, Frostbite engine
Well sleeping souls my friend sorry to say but you have believed very wrong..
Grathius, i dont believe you have ever played or even watched red faction if you believe that there is more destructability in BC. BC is just blowing holes in walls…i mean sure they might be big holes but you cant take down an entire bulilding, because for some reason unknown to man the corners of the building are resistant to any bullets or shells. However in Red Faction there was even a gun that would travel through ANY and i mean ANY wall to kill someone. once you had them locked on you could blow up 3 tons of cement the wall to the next room and the door to the toilet they were sitting on.
That game looks excelent. I cannot believe it slipped by me. I have been a big follower of the Battlefield series on the computer.
I see…..
“Plus, console gamers (in general) are a different breed and have shorter attention spans to PG hard core gamers. The gamers that would play Red Faction etc.” -
I was referring more in the greater sense than in the group that are ardent gamers such as yourself or many other that spend a great deal of time with games on a semi or hardcore basis.
It’s been shown that the % of gamers who own consoles, as oppsed to those who own PC’s spend less time per game and smaller sessions. AS many PC games such as the hardcore FPS’s, MMO, MMORPG’s etc etc require dedication, time, effort etc, whereas many of the console games, in general, are not so dedicated as many PC gamers.
Which doesn’t make one better or worse than the other, it’s just an interesting statistic that helps feed developers and publishers fueling games to the console market rather than PC market, as they know more games turn over due to shorter attention spans, short play life and the “next big thing syndrome” which exists more in consoles than in PC gaming per say.
The next Red Faction’s game is shaping up to be something all together different with its destructability, there was a great article about the level of it, and how each [art played a role in each element, and even time played a role.
Showing that a floor the was supported by steel beams would stay up, but, if the load on the floor was uneven, and due to heat, the steel would eventually buckle and the floor topple in the direction the beams gave way. Damn fine if you ask me.
LOL hate to get involved in this little debate but Jim is correct. You could actually tunnel through the solid walls, heaps of destructibility in Red Faction
Unfortunately I do not remember enough about the campaign to recall that. It was a long time ago I did play it, and most of the time I did spend with this game was in the multiplayer as the campaign did not have a lot of replay value. Lets just agree that they are both great games and leave it at that
Never got into multiplayer maybe it was onlky in multiplayer?
I never accused you of saying that RF is way better than BC. I was just merely saying that from my hours of playing the game and watching my brother play the game i honestly do not remember that much extensive destruction in the game in terms of just sitting there and blowing up pathways in the mines.
Correct me if i am wrong but the was one mission in RF where it was in the later stages of the game you needed to escort some guy through these mines, yet there were the laser sort of poles blocking each pathway that you needed to deactivate. It was after the underwater section.
If the destruction you say was in the game then all i would of had to do was use my grenade/rocket launcher and blow a nice path way around it through the mine. Yet you could not the only thing i could do was blow chunks out of the wall.
You sure ur not thinking of Red Faction 2? You could literally create complex cave systems in the multiplayer with nothing but a rocket launcher.
“Plus, console gamers (in general) are a different breed and have shorter attention spans to PG hard core gamers. The gamers that would play Red Faction etc.” – I only ever played this on consoles and other than the destruction it was a typical FPS.
I was not saying “Hey Red Faction is better!” or “Battlefield should have had more destructability!” All Im saying is that it’s not something that is new to the FPS genre and that in Red Faction you could destroy more things.
Fair enough mate. RF i believe did not have more destructibility than BC.
Blowing up holes in walls because you needed to so that you could progress through the story. From watching a few trailers now since i no longer have the game, you could blow walls up but they led to another room of enemies to kill mainly due to the door being locked and no way to open it.
Yes you could blow chunks from the walls but that’s all really. Chunks and chunk. You couldn’t blow yourself all the way to China Mars..
RF didn’t have the same amount of destructibility but ah well it was not bad just really short
Destructability in games is usually ruled by how much a developer want you to follow a path. If they have no reason for you to follow a major script or path, they allow more destructability, or less if they want to to follow that path.
So some level of restraint is needed within games, otherwise the user just doesn’t follow the desired path in order to get to the other end. The game’s purpose is lost, and you have chaos, which is why the destructability within the MP side of BC is less than it is in the SP side of the game.
They DICE) discuss this in one of their development diaries earlier on. Explaining how if they left it at the same level, maps would just become a free-for-all, and any of the game modes would become mute and unplayable. So some restrictions need to apply.
Plus, console gamers (in general) are a different breed and have shorter attention spans to PG hard core gamers. The gamers that would play Red Faction etc.
The next Red Faction Guerrilla is going to be awesome and has even more destructability than this one here (BC) and relies of natural physics for it’s outcome, making EVERY item react in a different way when approached in a “slightly” different fashion.
Did not realize it was a question Grath, but the destruction in Red Faction was a hell of a lot more plentiful. You could literally burrow caves through the thicker walls in this game. At least you could in the first one. The second seemed to have the destruction toned down mildly.
To edit my previous post i meant wouldn’t** go and call it average.
Well we could know more on Forza 3 come E3, as I have a sneaky feeling ‘in-mah-bones’ that there’s an announcement floatin’ around re Forza 3. If they plan on bringing it out late ’08 or even first quarter of ’09 (their last financial quarter for ’08) then they’d need to start stokin’ the fires about now, or no later than a moth or twop from now.
Any later, even though it is a top AAA title, it won’t give the PR machine time to really swing into full gear while dealing with both Gears Of War 2 and Too Human let alone Banjo-Kazooie Nuts-N-Bolts, the Halo Chronicles and Halo Wars . . . .
Yeah the EGO Engine used in GRID is an updated version of the NEON Engine used in DiRT.
Yeah each to their own in graphics mate but when comparing it to Frontlines, Shadowrun, The Club and others i would go and call it average. By no chance.
Plus note that i didn’t say they are some of the best i said they are in the higher tier of graphics on the 360 i have seen to date that could mean that they are better than Burnout but crappier then Gears.
So up the top with some of the great ones but not the absolute best.
Still haven’t answered the question on the destructibility of Red Faction and how it has way more then BC…..
If they could make Forza 3 look anything like GRID I’d be stoked!
The PS3 relies on both the cell and it’s sub-cores, which are not the pro-ported 8 or even 7 they originally sprouted about.
Sure, it has them, but it only uses around 5 on normal functions such as gaming etc and far less on intensive games. It uses the memory of one of the 256 sections (Graphics side) to help with the Blue-Ray, and they need the BR to drive the games as they are run off the disc as well as stored on the HDD, requiring more back and forth and memory consumption across the board.
The 360 has one function, run games, stream them off a basic DVD drive unit. no major memory required. The stand alone HD-DVD players for those that have them has it’s own memory chip built into it, so simply requires power to run alongside the 360. Again, something many gamers, especially those who scoff at it (the 36) seem to forget.
DICE use a simple smoke-n-mirror’s effect with their current title. While the game does have fully destructable environments (around the 85% mark as 100% is just stupid for any dev to use) the next sceen is played out and the previous one you’ve just wrecked is stored in the cache.
Then svceen isn’t changed off the disc, which remains normal, but when you slip back to a section you’ve been to, and demolished, the cache is triggered and overlays the normal scene with the demolished one. Neat trick, and one that works brilliantly using almost no memory.
Also showing that you do NOT need huge storage on a single disk to hold or manage all that detail or physics. They get more out of a standard DVD9 than they ever did, and many have more room available on them now than they did in the past. Now imagine this used in say Forza 3, it’s used in part in the Ego engine of Codemasters for Grid, which is why it looks a lot better than the Neon Engine which powered DiRT.
“It’s a brilliant multimedia ball-breaker, but as a gaming machine, it’s being hobbled due to the blu-ray player.”
Well said!
And it only means DICE are due more credit for a multiplatform game that looks as close to identical as I’ve ever seen.
Well with the Valhalla, they’ll have a unified CPU and GPU which will require LESS main ram. making for faster use of the cores.
The reason this works so well is that the 360 is using the PowerPC cores which the Apple Mac was founded on, and why the PC ppl found it hard to understand how the Apples could do so much with so little when compared to say a PC. They use it wisely, far less bottlenecks and thicker pipelines for data transfer, and thus don’t HAVE to have higher ram or bigger Ghz Processors.
Another thing the 360 has over the PS3, and one which many dev complain about is how it manages its small amount of ram. While they both share the same amount, (512), the PS3 is split in 2 while the 360′s is in one, and able to distribute more over different areas at any one given time. The PS3 has to also share that ram with high ram intensive tasks such as browsing, Blu-Ray disc caching etc, while the 360 – just does it for games.
It has no OS to speak of, so it doesn’t NEED a high level of ram. Which is one of the biggest things the original xbox Bad Boys (the initial group of 10 ppl in the first main xbox team) pushed for when designing the fist xbox. No OS and small load times.
With no OS to speak of, and not having to run so many ram intensive things at once, it can splitthe 6 threads of the 3 cores into various tasks easily, while the PS3′s single core, multicelled unit has 2 256 blocks of ram to sare ove rthe entire system.
See the issue that dev have now . . While the PS3 may well have several so-called cores, by the time it uses those for gaming only, you’re down to only 4-5 and less with some games, making it even harder for a developer to work on a game that may well require more attention.
There’s some interesting stuff out there on what the PS3 actually uses for gaming purposes,which many seem to forget when sprouting the PS3 is the best gaming console. It’s a brilliant multimedia ball-breaker, but as a gaming machine, it’s being hobbled due to the blu-ray player.
well Oz, remember that PC’s are also maintaining all other system functions and programs at the same time.
But yes, I understand your point. How expensive would it be if MS made the 360 have 1gb of ram? or something?
I also think the graphics in BF are quite ‘meh’ close up characters are good, and explosions look nice, but environments are ugly, plain and jaggy heaven.
Imagine what they could do if they quadrupled that RAM!
Having seen over 120 pics while gathering items for the review, with all of them in full high rez, you get to see how excellent they are and far better than many other games out there, especially from all the games I’ve gather pics on for all our reviews over the last several months..
But as you say, each to their own. But one thing that the game shows is, that you can have high levels of destructable environments that are ‘persistent’ and yet still have high levels of detail. Look at those houses and shots of walls blown out as you stand inside the houses in the thumbnails and last few pics in the review.
Now remember, you are dealing with 512 megs of ram here, not 2 gigs or more. For persistent destruction, that is there when you return, that requires a lot of PC memory, yet DICE have pulled this off with out any more memory, and still have plenty of grunt left over to run exceptionally good graphics, as well as character design. A feat that is high on a PC sporting a few gigs of ram, let alone a console with just 512 megs of ram.
Many seem to forget we are dealing with a very small amount of memory on a console, yet expect it to match if not better a high end PC gaming rig, which is impossible. But, we have to give it to the developers for finding ways of exploiting the hardware and getting more and more out of it as time goes on. I hazard to see what will be available by years end on several other great games coming out then, and what they will be able to do with environments and destructability.
Yeah I wouldn’t call this game a graphics whore, but it’s certainly pretty and the destruction and explosions are wonderful.
Great review mat and I liked the analogy of the “easiet” girl! lol
Wow I really would not say that about the graphics. To each their own I guess, but we have seen a lot better than in this. I do think its understandable considering the size of the levels tho.
Good Review. From the last time i played Red Faction there was destructibility but not to the extent of Bad Company. You could take out chunks of the walls. Blow up holes in certain ones because they needed to so you could progress through the story.
With the graphics i don’t think they are average at all. To me they are some of the higher tier graphics i have seen on the XBOX360 to date. Frontlines is what you would call average. Shadowrun is what you would call average.
On top just a bit to much averagein this review for my liking. Ah well.