Battlefield: Bad Company, by EA Dice, is set to release on June 23rd, 2008 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The campaigns take place in a fictional Eastern European country and contain both multi-player and single-player experiences to fit the tastes of a broad range of FPS gamers.
In the single-player campaign, you'll play the role of Preston Marlowe, a rookie in the 222nd Army battalion, B-Company. This is a squad of insubordinate soldiers who are penalized for their past actions by being fodder in the battle. You risk everything by going AWOL and head on a personal quest for gold behind the lines of your enemy.
We were given an a chance to take a good look at BF: Bad Company thanks to Electronic Arts working with our team of "crack game reviewers" to get you an early preview before the public beta and final release of the title.
It is important to know this is a "beta" or "demo" of the title and won't contain all known features and functionality. The team still has time to make last minute changes or tweaks to the in-game battle system to balance out problems they find as more users get online with the public beta in a few days. So, don't expect a complete set of maps, game types and single-player campaigns.
Single Player
The single player campaign can best be described as, "meh." The BF: Bad Company demo only contains a small portion of single player, perhaps they chose a level that was basic and bland on purpose. The single player game looks and acts much like the multi-player in terms of graphics and sound, but the "feel" is not the same.
The campaign acts like a Call of Duty campaign when you look at the overall objective systems and battles but lacks the magic behind the CoD single player campaign. Playing through the CoD single player missions gives you the sense of really being on the battle field, focusing on your objectives and constantly under fire and pinned down. BF: Bad Company's demo gives you a feeling of openness and waiting for something to occur. You spend too much time hunting down the enemies spread across the field and less time feeling as if they're closing in on your position and pinning you behind a wall.
Single player might be best used as a training manual for how to play multi-player or a good alternative if you lose network connectivity at home for a few hours.
Multi-Player
The beauty of the Battlefield series is in the multi-player. While single player seems more like a checkbox to tick as a feature, multi-player feels solid, full of action and a sense of team pride and progression. You can take to the field as an Assault, Demolitions, Recon, Specialist, or Support Officer each with their own weapons and unlockable features.
Unlike Call of Duty 4, BF: Bad Company focuses on two styles of battle: vehicle and man on the streets. A gamer can spend their entire time crusing through tanks, jeeps, boats and helicopters or running with their squad through farmland and enemy territories. You might chose to split your time in vehicles and ground based on the attack style or the stage of battle. To each his own.
Multi-player urges gamers to work together as a team by rewarding points for support folks healing their brothers in arms or defending a base from incoming attack. You'll also get assist points for taking out ground troups while riding behind a high caliber weapon on a tank or jeep. They trick to gaining points will be identifying your enemy from your friend. You'll notice the uniforms are very similar on both sides and you may end up taking negative points as you accidently fire upon a friendly soldier or shelling a friendly tank.
Much like Call of Duty 4, you may be at a disadvantage when first playing the multi-player campaign because you won't have the same weapon selections as other gamers. As you progress through the multi-player matchups you'll be building up a score tally which will advance your rank in the Army. Advanced ranks allow you to unlock new weapons and devices to help the war effort. A newbie might walk into a game with near no experience and be pitted against a seasoned veteran with a highly advanced gun with laser scopes, a box of anti-tank mines and a chip on their shoulder. Selecting a ranked game may solve much of these problems since you should be grouped with people of similar experience (or lack of experience).
Holy Crap, I Can Break Stuff!
The key component to BF: Bad Company is in the destructable environments. Never before has a game been able to cause so much utter destruction that you're giddy with excitement.
This feature alone sells the title and will, no doubt, be a staple requirement in future FPS tactical fighters. At first, you'll notice everyone firing at buildings and walls just to poke holes in them. Why? Because they can. Destructable environments is much like "new car smell," eventually you'll get used to it. However, the advantages you receive in battle are far beyond anything you've experienced in a first person shooter to date.
We've always been annoyed by the "tactics" of a strafe and shoot player. Driving a tank down the street results in gorilla rocket launcher tactics which cannot be overcome by tank battle... until now.
In a stand off with an annoying ground troup hiding behind a wall with a rocket launcher? Drop a shell into the wall and reveal your opponent like a plastic toy in a box of Fruity Pebbles. Watch them run as they try again and again to hide behind the destructable environments while you slowly crumble the walls around them.
As they run into a building shell the doorway to blow a whole the size of Texas and allow ground troups to rush in and evict the unwilling participant. If your troups are having trouble getting a jeep through enemy walls and fences have a team of tanks draw a path with destructive force or have a support engineer cut them away with their tools.
If you find the palm trees getting in your way you can mow them down like a scene straight out of Predator or just drive the tank through them and start your own path less traveled.
You'll find the landscape is never the same if you call in mortar fire with your GPS device. The ability for the Support and Recond class to call in mortar and missles on an area of the map (within sight) is intense. Nagging snipers become fodder when you sight them in for destruction from above or cause them to run like little cockroaches to avoid certain peril.
Vehicles
The vehicle selection is fairly broad in terms of weaponry. You can take a fast boat up the river, jump in a Jeep, Humvee, Helicopters, Tanks and others. Unfortunately, everything but the tanks and helicopters require you to find a friend to do any real damage. We used the Humvee to get from point A to point B quickly with less emphisis on using it in tactical battle situations.
Although the faster vehicles with high caliber weapons should be devistating, it's hard to find anyone on your team to answer the calls for assistence when it comes to arming them; most gamers want to race for a chopper or tank before getting into a jeep and buzzing the enemy base.
The helicopter is a beast of a weapon if you've found a competent pilot; as of this writing, most gamers are not so savvy with the choppers. More often than not, a pilot will jump in the beast and fly it straight into the ground, water or off the borders of the map and die instantly. In the hands of an experienced pilot, this is one of the most deadly weapons in Battlefield: Bad Company. It all comes down to having a chance to learn it without your team yelling at you for destroying the formidable weapon.
Maps and Modes
There isn't too much to say on the maps and modes yet, the retail version is said to come with eight maps, we've seen one: Oasis. We're also only given the game mode Gold Rush where the attackers have to destroy two crates filled with gold. Once you've destroyed the two crates more of the map opens up (on the defenders side) and you force yourself forward to take out two more crates, repeat two to three times to gain victory over the defenders.
The attackers are limited to a set number of respawns (called "re-enforcements") before they'll lose. The defenders have to blow through all the re-enforcements to win while the attackers have to destory all the gold crates. Based on those mechanics, you can imagine a game can take a long time to complete! However, it is usually fun the entire time.
The easiest way to lose as an attack is to focus your entire effort on shelling your opponent. If you don't make any attempts at destroying the crates, requiring players to walk up and set a charge, you'll find yourself on the losing side of the battle. While playing online we've heard plenty of gamers saying "go for the crates! We're not getting anywhere!" It takes a lot of dedication, teamwork and effort to set a charge on a crate in enemy territory and then defending the explosives from being disabled before they go off. This is part of the tactics of Battlefield: Bad Company.
Team Play FTL
When selecting the multi-player styles we encountered two ways to play: ranked and unranked. Although you can start a custom game with specific rules and maps, ranked and unranked do not have a lobby system so you'll be teamed up with strangers.
Browsing the multi-player features didn't bring us any lobby options, which seems odd. It's difficult to imagine a competitor to CoD4 that doesn't allow you and your friends to compete against each other or play against a seasoned ranked team of strangers. For a game that is very team-focused, the best teams have time to practice and work together--not just be dumped into battle with complete strangers and asked to win.
With the Xbox Live experience, you'll also encounter squeeky voiced annoying kids (even in the beta) who talk over the battle constantly and tell everyone how they're going to build a huge tank squad that's going to "pwn everyone on this game." Although there are plenty of kids with respect and the ability to play the game with tactical prowess it only takes one idiot to ruin the experience for everyone (note: idiots can be adults too.)
We're Prone With Shock
Battles can be intense and destructive, but you won't be able to lay prone to sneak a shot at your attackers or hide from tank shells. After playing a CoD title you'd expect to have the ability to lay prone and come to react by smashing the right-stick in order to drop to your belly, but you'll find yourself full of bullets if you attempt that in the heat of battle.
The lack of this feature feels like you're missing a pinky toe. You don't know why you need it or how you use it, but without it you fall on your face more often than not.
Bugs, Flaws, and Lag
Beta's and advanced copies of titles usually result in a few nasty bugs, game flaws and tons of lag. You can spend hours frustrated with offline servers because systems are being reset, rebooted and rebuilt to handle the scale of the gamers. EA Dice has changed the battlefield of betas by creating a preview beta with minimal to none of the standard issues.
Every few attempts to login to the multi-player servers results in a "try again later" message, which is alliviated by trying a second time. Unlike CoD4 where we spent ten to twenty minutes trying to get into a game, we're in a multi-player BF: Bad Company game in under 30-seconds with or without errors. Once in the game we've never been kicked, bumped or disconnected nor have we experienced any form of noticable lag over a standard consumer grade broadband connection. Impressive.
Spawn points seem to be limited to two areas, you can chose to spawn at your current outpost/camp or in the midst of battle with your buddies. Spawning at camp may lead to a five minute jaunt through the desert to find action if you can't find a vehicle while spawning with your squad may be suicidal. Many times we've spawned in a tank just as it was shelled to oblivion or spawned in a falling helicopter. Luckily, before you spawn you can see your destination and judge your willingness to spawn there.
If you're used to unlocking weapons "on the fly" in games like Call of Duty 4, you'll be disappointed with the unlock feature in BF: Bad Company. We've only found the unlock feature on the main menu of the multi-player game; we cannot seem to unlock a weapon after a battle has ended without exiting out to the main multi-player menu. This is a bit annoying.
Halo Freaks
Halo gamers that refuse or dislike the Call of Duty series will probably find this just as undesirable. The game play is slightly different, the controls are styled differently and the crowd of gamers have a certain opinion of how these tactical games should be played.
While a die-hard Halo 3 gamer may not care for the title, this isn't a hardcore tactical fighting game limited to Battlefield fans. BF: Bad Company is fairly fast paced and rapid in terms of multi-player action. The learning curve isn't rough, you'll be able to be an affective team member within an hour or so, the helicopter and other advanced weapons may take a bit longer to master but you can do without them.
Marketing FTW
EA's marketing the heck out of BF: Bad Company. To unlock some of the weapons you'll have to play into some of their promotional games by pre-ordering the game, registering for their newsletter and other creative means.
You'll also be rewarded with unlocked weapons which nobody else has (yet) if you buy their special Gold Edition. EA said the weapons won't be anymore powerful than others... just different, however, the items are unlocked in the standard game by reaching rank 24--the last rank of the game. Huh?
Overall
Impressive. Destructable environments are like sweet cherries on a dessert of awesome. You'll race through the desert, arching shells at the enemy, sniping the faces off your opponent and calling in mortar to rain down hell. Single player is there, a staple must have apparently, but multi-player is where you're going to spend your time much like you'd expect from a Battlefield game.
Will it cut into CoD4 sales? Who cares, the game has been ranked #1 in NDP figures for months now, it's time for something new to hit the shelves. CoD4 gamers now have a new installation of multi-player goodness and the Activision teams has a new competing product to make their next franchise title more awesome.
Drop-in ranked and unranked matches with random gamers is exciting but won't sustain if we're not allowed to play with folks on our friends list. It's just a preview, this may be something we're going to see in the final game or when the beta goes public.
