Battlefield Bad Company 2 Review

Battlefield Bad Company 2 is the first outing on the PC platform for DICE's Frostbite engine. Developed for the console-only Bad Company 1, the engine has a very cool party trick: destructible map elements. Enemy combatant ducked behind a wall? Switch to the grenade launcher and remove the wall. Buildings are no refuge either - apply enough firepower and they will come tumbling down into a mess of rubble.

The effects aren't underdone: blast the side of a building with a rocket or shell and the subsequent explosion will send bits of brick flying in all directions and fill the air with dust, leaving a convenient new entrance through the wall. It not a complete system - many objects, such as shipping containers, remain impervious to influence by explosive - but it is nonetheless quite something to play with: thrilling, and a tactical game-changer.

It's a big development in back-of-the-box features, and Bad Company 2 pulls it off with a flourish. But what of the rest of the game?

Bad Company 2 comes in two segments, single player and multiplayer - I'll be looking at the multiplayer with this review.

The multiplayer supports up to thirty-two players, and can be played in four different game modes: Conquest, Rush, Squad Rush, and Squad Deathmatch. Conquest is the Battlefield classic in which teams fight over flags, Rush is an objective-based attack/defend game, Squad Rush is the same played with eight-players, and Squad Deathmatch is a deathmatch mode where teams of four compete to be the first to fifty kills. Maps come in temperate, jungle, desert or snow enviroments, and are much smaller and tighter than maps found in previous PC Battlefield titles. The Rush maps especially have a quite corridor-like design, but they generally flow well, allow for some maneuver, and are attractively put together.

When you jump into a game, the first thing you'll have to do is to choose whether to play Assault, Engineer, Medic or Recon. Each class has it's own set of weapons and gadgets to unlock, and has a special ability: Assaults drop ammo packs, Engineers repair vehicles, or destroy them with AT weapons, Medics heal or revive fallen comrades, and Recons call in artillery strikes. The different classes' range of weapons and abilities mean that no one class will dominate outright, and each must rely on support from other classes to operate fully effectively. It's part of an over-arching design, including a squad system and a neat spotting mechanic, that encourages team-play over lone-wolfing.

It wouldn't, of course, be a Battlefield game if it didn't include drivable vehicles, and there is a decent selection of them to play around with in Bad Company 2 – APCs, tanks, quadbikes, boats, helicopters, and remote-controlled UAVs (but no planes!). Good use of vehicles can be the difference between victory and defeat, though the vehicles do not take as prominent a role here as they have in previous Battlefield games. Bad Company 2 is focused much more on tight infantry combat with vehicles complementing the action rather than defining it.

There are alot of cool moments to be had with Bad Company 2's multiplayer mode - you and a squad of buddies advancing towards an objective with support from a friendly tank, or scrambling through a gauntlet of enemy fire to revive a fallen team-mate, or dashing out of a building that's about to collapse. On the great minefield of the interwebs, it does not always come together, but when it does, it's alot of fun.

Graphically the game is on par with the best of this generation, but worthy of special mention are the sound effects, which are phenomenally good, especially in the slightly over-the-top 'war tapes' mode. With war tapes turned on, the entire sound-scape of the game becomes more punchy, intense and loud. Particularly in extra-chaotic games, it's a treat to listen to.

Bad Company 2 is not a game without problems, however. The server browser, bandied about so much by DICE following the revelation that Modern Warfare 2 would use an auto match-making system, is only adequate. It takes a long time to refresh, does not allow filtering of servers by location, and forgets previous filter settings every time the game is restarted. It is also not viewable in-game, which is a nice convenience in games such as Team Fortress 2.

Further, there is no way to see at-a-glance the current spread of classes on your team, no way to find the name of the current server outside of loading screens, the context-sensitive comm-system offers no quick way to thank another player, and there's no way to tell how many team-mates are riding in an APC or tank without attempting to enter yourself. Little things.

The worst of Bad Company 2's sins however, is the auto-balancer: it doesn't auto-balance. It is inert, inactive, passive - it does nothing. Compounding the problem is the well-intentioned limit on team-switching, which prevents you from switching teams too often. If you have already switched once in a match, switching back to even out the numbers will often not be allowed. As a consequence, 18 on 11 steam-rolls are not an uncommon occurrence. Presumably, this *will* be patched, but for the time being it is quite frustrating.

Overall, Bad Company 2 is a blast; a fantastic pseudo-realistic shooter in a distinguished line of such games. It has problems, but, encouragingly, they are almost all of the sort that can be patched relatively easily – hopefully DICE will deliver.

4/5

PLUS:
-Brilliant sound effects
-Top-line graphics
-Team-focused game play

MINUS:
-Adequate-at-best server browser
-No LAN support