Battlefield: Bad Company

Honour. Duty. Integrity. These are words that B Company soldiers may be aware of, but David Hollingworth doesn’t think they care for them much.

The Battlefield series of games from EA and DICE has a long and mostly illustrious history, having created games and game types that are considered industry standards of multiplayer gaming. However, one thing the series is not known for is character and individual storytelling.

Until now, with Bad Company.

The artwork on the game’s cover says it all, really – it’s a fragmentation grenade with a smiley-face badge on the safety pin. That theme of grim humour and high explosives runs through the entire game.

The single player game starts off in a workman like fashion, at least from a gameplay point of view. The missions are very much of the go-here-blow-up-X variety, but what lifts the game is excellent voice acting, superb writing, and the single best sound effects we’ve heard in a game of this kind to date.

You take the role of Preston Marlowe, your classic military everyman who’s just been shipped into some nameless and war-torn Eastern European country to join B Company. This is the unit where the army’s misfits end up, and your squad is no exception, comprising an explosives expert with an explosives fetish, a chattering conspiracy theorist and a sergeant who’s merely counting time until his tour is up.

The tone is set early on when you arrive. Haggard, the bang-bang guy, leans in close as you introduce yourself, then mysteriously and imperiously says “Pleased to meet you. You smell very clean.” Banter like that follows you around the battlefield, and each mission is punctuated by set piece mission updates and discussions of overall strategy. The dialogue fairly sparkles, whether it’s the paranoid Sweetwater pining for the unit’s dispatch operator, or Haggard declaring that he’s going to go check a dead man for a pulse – in his pockets, of course.

After a few missions where B (for Bad, get it?) Company and your squad in particular is called upon to do the dirty jobs for the rest of the US Army, you discover that not only are you fighting Russians (and gee, it warms our heart to see the Ruskies as badguys again), but there are highly paid mercenaries taking shots at you too. Mercenaries who are paid in solid gold bars... from there on the game takes on a decidedly Kelly’s Heroes feel.

The gameplay is solid, and while it may seem a little simplistic you’ll quickly discover there are some lovely nuances. The single player doesn’t have classes as such – multiplayer does – but rather weapon sets. For instance, you can have an assault rifle with a grenade launcher, a sniper rifle with a pistol, or a shotgun with frag grenades (and smiley faces). Similarly you have a single equipment slot that further rounds out your skillset – things like a repair tool to keep vehicles running, an RPG, or a remote mortar targeting device.

Each level is set in a wide open map with a changing series of missions that draw you through it, and you can always complete objectives in any order and in a number of ways. Tasked with taking out some communication antennae? You can get up close and destroy them with some C4, stay the hell away and call down mortar fire (Russian mortar fire, no less, which is just hilarious), or any combination.

There are vehicles to hoon about in as well, but they are more of a convenience than a heavy part of the single-player game. For instance, if you drive your HUMVEE into a wall and total it (which we never do, honest), hoofing it across the map is always an option.



The best thing about the gameplay is the destructible environment. Nigh on every wall, fence, sand-bag emplacement and tree can be blown up, knocked down or similarly pulverised. The transient nature of the battlefield makes for some thrilling encounters – you can blow in walls to flank an enemy, destroy their cover, or block line of sight with fallen trees. We expect in multiplayer – which we’ve not really had any time with, so expect an update on www.atomicmpc.com.au – that this will mean absolute carnage for countless Eastern European villages.

But it’s all of these elements taken together than really make the game work. The cries of your squadmates, the echo of rifle-fire and the thudding impacts of artillery as you call down a strike that destroys your target and all nearby buildings... this is war at its cinematic best.

That sense of cinema, however, is marred by a number of design decisions that seem to suggest certain parts of the single player game were a little... rushed.

For one thing, like many squad-based games your buddies follow you around, occasionally doing something useful, but mostly they’re there for flavour. This gets annoying when you move too far away from them, and they spawn into existence right next to you. Sometimes they are content to cross the map, but other times they seem to have personal teleporters that they’re simply not sharing. Bastards.

Then there’s the respawning model. When you die, you spawn back at the last save point; however, the gameworld does not reset. If you just picked up a new weapon before you’ve died, or cleared a house, it’ll stay cleared. Your squad will even start heading back toward you as if this happens all the time. We’re not sure though this is a positive move toward freer gameplay, or a lax design choice. Either way, it’s sort of... odd.

Still, this is a wonderful new chapter in the Battlefield series, full of pleasant surprises and intense gameplay. For the stellar sound effects alone, this is a tops FPS. If only it were on PC...