BattleField : Bad Company

For many, the Battlefield franchise has become the staple of serious, open-ended war games. While the open-ended first-person shooter remains in tact with Bad Company, the humor and storyline is sure to delight many who have stayed away from the games.

While my preview was only based on the Xbox 360 demo, which is now available on Live, my experience may not reflect the final product.

The story begins as your character finds himself in B Company, a somewhat misfit squad of wise-cracking soldiers. The game starts out like any wartime shooter as you follow orders to an objective, learning skills on the way. But by the time the game becomes interesting, the demo is over. Of course, the demo ends as your group discovers gold on the enemy. While the demo doesn’t show this, the game from their takes on a mercenary storyline where your squad will spend its time collecting this gold in an open-ended format. While I can’t comment on that section since I didn’t play it, the demo did feature some reasonably well-acted voice work and writing. Some of the better and funnier lines I had heard in a game, especially a war shooter.

The gameplay, while relatively similar to other first-person shooters, does have some idiosyncrasies. For one, recovering health is reliant on injecting yourself with a shot. While this might sound cumbersome, it does add another element of strategy when during a battle, you have to switch from a weapon to the shot, inject it from cover, and get back into battle. It’s very easy to get killed in this game (a couple of shots), so I found myself almost constantly injecting the shot – a mechanic that really took away from the fun of shooting and tactics and put me in a constant state of near death.

The gunplay was a little too twitchy for my taste and became overly frenetic when trying to target an enemy. What I did like, however, was the realistic firing recoil and sound. And while guns can pack a hard punch into enemies, try shooting rockets at buildings. Yes, most buildings in this game are destructible. But because most are, the buildings that aren’t stick out like a sore thumb. Because of these differences, I recommend hardcore shooters definitely check out the demo before making a purchase.

Overall, the demo sparked my interest, particularly because of the writing and interesting story premise. While this was just a demo, there were quite a few bugs present in the game. In one of the final missions, while running through a trench, enemies would spawn randomly right in front of me. But while the gameplay was too sporadic for my taste, I can’t say that it will be in the final version. This game is very stylized version of Battlefield, with broadly painted characters and over-the-top action. If you’re looking for a change in tone from war shooters, definitely keep this bad boy on your radar.