Difficulty:

Very Easy

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Don't believe the hype"

In recent years it has become a trend to release shooters with throwaway content and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is not an exception to that rule. Featuring a tedious and mind-numbing campaign the focus is clearly on the multiplayer side of things. It's a shame that the multiplayer is so limited then, making for a game that lacks any meaningful content. Bad Company 2's only claim to fame is that it allows thirty-two players on one map and has dedicated servers. Otherwise, there is nothing new or exciting to see here.

There are quite a few words that can be used to describe Bad Company 2's campaign and none of them are positive. It is a poorly designed, "me-too" type of experience. Call of Duty games feature better campaigns than what is on offer in Bad Company 2, and really, Call of Duty as a series is the king of throwaway campaigns. For all intents, Bad Company 2 may as well have been a rail-shooter. There is no freedom of movement. Even in sections when vehicles come into play you are stuck in a narrow path, a constricting corridor; literal tubes if you will. The design of the campaign makes it easier to overlook the fact that there is zero artificial intelligence at play. Enemies pop up and shoot at you, each time they go to the exact same positions and use the exact same tactics. They will not fire at you until they reach their position. While the game is not as scripted as the silly Call of Duty: Black Ops it also lacks any of the intensity and bombast that Call of Duty portrays through its inane jingoism.

The lack of AI in the game is criminal. Playing through Bad Company 2 on the hardest difficulty setting is comparable to playing Halo: Reach on the easiest difficulty setting. It's a joke. Enemies do not have AI, they are scripted and follow the same path, the only thing that improves is their aim. It is a shame to see the modern military shooter as the only sub-genre of shooter that simply refuses to evolve with the times.

With no set-piece battles, no true enemies to fight against and no true level design to play in, Bad Company 2's campaign has only one thing going for it: humor. The aptly named Bad Company is a legitimately funny bunch. The combination of Sarge, Sweetwater and Haggard is hilarious. Marlowe, your character, doesn't really get involved in the banter, but the other three can be funny bringing up jokes of who is going to hell and how one NPC character is "up in that big bong in the sky." The sad thing is that the humor isn't as prevalent as it could be. I often found myself stopping to listen to the team talk rather than moving forward to fight.

Regardless of how the campaign turned out, this is a Battlefield game and Battlefield is known for the class-based team multiplayer. Maybe my expectations were too high. Maybe I was expecting something that would be more instantly gratifying. Or maybe my standards are higher than many other shooter fans. Bad Company 2's multiplayer is limited to four modes. The first time I tried to go online I did a double-take. Rush and Squad Rush are basically the same mode, just with different amounts of players. You attack two points and if you succeed more of the map with other attack points opens up. Conquest was my favorite mode, as two teams try to hold down three control points to build up their team's score. The final mode is Squad Deathmatch.

These modes are not new. Any of these modes are available in a variety of other shooters, particularly the popular Halo and Call of Duty games, and are further joined by numerous other modes, sometimes even dozens of varying modes. It is absolutely ridiculous to see a multiplayer shooter basically feature three games modes, all of which are extremely similar to one another.

The destructibility of environments certainly helps change the battlefield layout each time, but that really is not enough to warrant playing such a limited and basic game. Destructibility is fine, but more game modes and options for playing would have been welcome. Capture the Flag and Free-for-All for instance are tossed in almost every shooter released, but even those basic modes are shafted here. Meanwhile, Call of Duty: Black Ops tries to change things up with wager matches and a variety of gambling like modes despite its poor production and lack of focus, but Bad Company instead opts to be one of the most limited releases in a long time.

Another area of concern is how the actual gunplay itself lacks the weight and feel of genre heavyweights like F.E.A.R., Crysis and Halo. It just feels robotic and lacks the smooth flow of Halo, the kinetic energy of F.E.A.R. and so on. Bad Company 2 just feels basic.

The graphics are decent, honestly, with a game as linear and small as this I certainly expect better graphics. These are not wide vistas that we are fighting in, these are narrow hallways. Regardless of whether the game sets you in a jungle or a snowy mountain you are constantly aware of how confining the game is. The character models are decent, but as is a problem with many shooters, when you fight unmasked enemies they all use the same character model and it breaks the immersion. At least with masked enemies or aliens it isn't noticeable. Regardless, the characters look fine, not particularly good, but not necessarily bad.

The environments certainly hold up better and seeing the wall in front of you crumble from enemy fire certainly can pull you into the experience more than you would think.

Where Bad Company 2 truly shines is the sound department though, gunfights are loud and when vehicles enter the mix the audio only gets better. The actual voice-acting is pretty stiff from all of the characters outside of the jokes Bad Company cracks. The music is as throwaway as the campaign. It doesn't add to the immersion in any way. Again, it isn't that the music is bad; it just isn't that good either.

It is extremely easy to see why Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has earned as much praise as it has: it is cheap entertainment. It lacks the creativity, intensity and grandeur of the genre's best. But it is a class-based military shooter and that is simply what sells in an era dominated by Call of Duty. Another military game would eventually rise up to challenge it for the rights of mediocrity. For better or for worse, Battlefield has become that game.