Bad Company Hands On Preview

The Battlefield franchise has enjoyed years of success on the PC side of things but clearly the folks at DICE are wanting to expand. Battlefield 2 Modern Combat was great but due to the platform and the timing of it’s release it didn’t receive all the attention it really deserved. A few years on and DICE are back with Battlefield Bad Company. This time built from the ground up for the current range of systems on the brand new Frostbite Engine.

Battlefield titles have always been focused on the multiplayer and although the same is the case for Bad Company, the single player campaign does have a lot of polish to it. You take the role of Preston Marlowe who gets assigned to B-Company who are basically a squad of rejects and misfits who can’t be trusted to fit in with the regular troops. Early on through the story they find out about a team of mercenaries who get paid in gold bars, they then risk everything by ignoring orders in a quest to find more. Although it sounds like it will be packed with bad-ttitude the whole thing is voiced over by the protagonist and from what we’ve played he sounds like he has his heart in the right place. Making him very approachable as a character despite what he is actually doing.

Meanwhile the multiplayer is more impressive with up to twenty four people on a server at one time, you can get into some pretty hefty fights. The traditional large scale maps, littered with multiple objects (providing your not playing straight up team deathmatch) make for interesting battles over buildings and checkpoints. It does offer some strategical elements and greatly promotes the team aesthetic. You can just run out get a few kills then get shot yourself but the key to winning is by implementing tactics such as flanking to out smart your opponent. The nature of some game modes means that the right tactic is always different this really gives you the impression that this is the thinking-mans shooter although you could just do the opposite and just go at each other with tanks and HMMWV’s.

Now lets take a break from Battlefield as we divulge into the Playstation 2’s game library. Red Faction was a game that has drawn many comparisons to Bad Company as it had destructible environments. Credit where credit is due, Red Faction was and is a decent shooter but it relied too much on the destructible scenery. Too much to the point were if you ever got stuck you could just shoot a few walls and move on. It made Red Faction feel very gimmicky and took away from what a technical achievement it was albeit slightly a minor one. Bad Company implements this feature in a different way. Instead of making it the focal point it makes it more a tactical element. For example, during one game online, I was forced to take cover in a building to avoid being tank fodder. The tank then blew a giant hole in the wall forcing me to move on, this might make the tanks and other such vehicles over powered but after all they are tanks.

Complete with its plethora of modes and ranks to unlock new equipment, the multiplayer side of things has the opportunity to get players hooked. If supported with extra maps through DLC it should stay firmly rooted to disk drives everywhere and although Battlefield Bad Company might not have the staying power for every gamer, it looks like it could offer a decent summers worth of shooting for most.

We look forward to seeing and playing what else it will have to offer come June the 23rd (NA) or 26th (Euro) on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms.