Battlefield: Bad Company 2 review

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (BBC2) is a first-person shooter set in the modern day, so comparisons to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) are inevitable. It’s a little unfair, as the two games are entirely different: MW2 is a highly-scripted and fast-paced game set in small levels; BBC2 is a slower game set in huge levels with plenty of vehicles to control.

The game has two modes of play, single-player and multi-player. The single-player game starts off in WWII as a squad of commandos attempt to retrieve a secret Japanese weapon; skipping forward to the current day it’s your job to track the weapon down before it’s used in WWIII.

The plot’s a little boring and the two-dimensional characters don’t help, particularly as they just spout a mish-mash of all the clichéd gung-ho lines from every war film ever. Get past this nonsense and the game rapidly improves. The main point is to make you move through massive maps to location markers where you inevitably have to fight of swathes of bad guys. You have to be careful, as the enemy have entrenched positions, rocket launchers and heavy artillery that can take you out in a few seconds.

The explosives also highlight one of the major selling points of the game: destructible scenery. So, hiding in a house works for a while until a guy with a rocket launcher blows the side off. This adds tension to the firefights and makes the game a lot harder.

The graphics are excellent and help create a realistic environment that makes you feel you’re in a real location with loads of space around you. Scalable graphics options means that the game should run well, and fast, on a variety of hardware.

The single-player game is really just a way of getting you into the real fun: multiplayer. This has three main game modes, team deathmatch; rush, where you have to attack or defend a series of points; and conquest, where you need to capture and hold points on the map. It might not sound like much, but the large maps mean that some traditional game types, such as capture the flag, would end up being incredibly boring.

The main fun here is that you play on incredibly large maps and have access to vehicles, from quad-bikes and tanks up to remote control drones and planes. There’s nothing like jumping in a tank, storming into the middle of the enemy and blowing them to pieces with some well-aimed shells.

It’s easy to pick up and play, and you earn experience points as you go, giving you access to bigger and better weaponry. We slightly prefer the hectic face-to-face action of MW2, but if you’d like a stealthier game with larger maps, tanks and destructive scenery, BBC2 is brilliant fun.