BattleField Bad Company 2
Early on in Battlefield: Bad Company 2, during a mission that the ESRB has somewhat spoiled, you hear an absolutely frightening and ominous sound. Its inspiration can easily be found in things like a foghorn or the tripod from Steven Spielberg’s version of War of the Worlds, but even so, it’s still a surprising and unsettling noise. The way it completely assaults your speakers and rattles your subwoofer serves as a perfect example of some of Bad Company 2′s phenomenal sound design — one of the many things that developer DICE has gotten right this time around.
Sure, there are a lot of improvements (and even a few missteps) within Bad Company 2, but the sound design is particularly noteworthy. It’s not just that the guns sound realistic (as far as I can tell), but that DICE’s sound gurus have tweaked, amplified, and reverbed them enough to sound terrifying. Sniper rounds carry an ominous thunderclap in passing. Assault rifle bullets alternate between cracking the air and forcibly puncturing whatever surface — flesh, wood, stone, or metal — they impact. The way a light machine-gun erupts during gunfire indicates that it’s designed expressly for the purpose of murdering your enemy. Other sounds, such as the crunch of footsteps in the snow, the creaks of collapsing buildings, or the chattering of jungle insects, contribute to what is one of the best sounds-capes in a modern FPS (especially if you set your audio to the “war tapes” sound mix).
While the sound is the most standout, overall, Bad Company 2 clearly and significantly improves on its predecessor. The graphics are gorgeous — the jungle deserves the word “lush,” while the numerous firefights fill the screen with smoke and debris (I notice mild tearing on the console versions, but I’m happy to see that my built-in-2007 PC with dual-core CPU and an 8800-series nVidia card still has a decent frame-rate even with pretty graphics). The bullet-pointed destructibility has been improved as well; while you can’t destroy everything like in Red Faction: Guerrilla, you can demolish around 92-percent of the environment (that last eight percent covers things like gigantic buildings or massive piles of logs). Health now auto-regenerates, rather than requiring you to jam a needle into your chest every few minutes. The A.I. enemies are smarter than in Bad Company; they’ll actually punch holes in your cover with heavy weaponry and exploit that temporary vulnerability. Interestingly though, your squad seems to be treading water: they’ll never die on you, but then again, they aren’t too effective. I think my squad-mates killed about ten guys to my several hundred during the campaign — sure, I’m glad I never fail a mission because one dies, but I do wish they carried their weight more often. Even as such, when you combine the increased destruction with the upgraded graphics, the fantastic sound, and the way that both your opponents and your buddies fill the air with gunfire, you can see how Bad Company 2 provides chaotic (and memorable) firefights.
Besides the general, “wow, that’s better” slate of improvements, Bad Company 2 finally does something that’s eluded DICE so far: provide a good, single-player FPS campaign (Mirror’s Edge, which was its own unique thing anyhow, notwithstanding). Previous Battlefield games literally took multiplayer maps, added bots, and called them “single-player.” Even the previous Bad Company’s campaign felt like a Conquest map, but with added dialogue. For Bad Company 2, DICE drops that methodology, uses the more traditional “linear roller coaster” motif, and does a pretty damn good job of it.
The plot has the same squad of misfits within “Bad Company” attempting to prevent a nasty Russian (who bears a striking resemblance to Lazarevic from Uncharted 2) from acquiring a long-lost super-weapon. I’m actually a bit sad that it’s so straightforward this time, unlike the previous game’s “Three Kings: The Video Game” approach. But it’s a serviceable story along the same lines as Predator, Commando, or The Rock. If you think too hard about plot holes and leaps of logic, then you’ll get annoyed, but if you just accept the spectacle the moment-to-moment firefights bring, then you should be fine.
There’s actually a decent variety of game play within Bad Company 2′s 13-mission campaign (which takes about eight-to-ten hours to get through, depending on whether you hunt for hidden guns or satellite up-links for Achievements/Trophies). Besides shooting guys and blowing holes in walls, it has you: fighting off frostbite in the Andes, rolling a tank into a South American village, driving around the Atacama desert (which is actually a pretty cool HD remake of Battlefield 1942‘s El Alamein map), and tearing apart an enemy base with a helicopter’s mini-gun. Plus, while the plot unfolds in a straightforward manner, the incidental dialogue between your squad mates maintains a healthy dose of humor; they break the tension and the action by heatedly debating topics such as the Dallas Cowboys, the best scene in Predator, and the difference between Africa and South America.
Inevitably, comparisons to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare follow when discussing Bad Company, and I swear this isn’t out of laziness or group think, but the deliberate focus on a more linear single-player somewhat invites said comparison. Bad Company 2 flat out dares for, and even revels, in it. The daring comes from a mix of sly dialogue moments (disparaging remarks get made about snowmobiles and rifles-with-heartbeat-monitors), to copy-and-paste jobs of COD situations (using air support while cornering a villain in a safe house, a vicious firefight aboard an airplane, providing support as either a sniper or a helicopter gunner). Though for the latter, it seems to be an “anything you can do, I can do better” idea — you’ll find situations that have been clearly lifted from the COD playbook, but embellished with enough destruction, sound, and fury to make it a “we’re not copying, we’re doing it better” moment.
