Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Singleplayer Review

Well, I’ve just finished the Single player campaign for Bad Company 2, which entitles me to an opinion. I did not finish it on easy so I could blitz it, I did not finish on hard so I could be a purist, I went for vanilla “Normal”.

Overall, I very much enjoy the mechanics of this game, but I think there are a few flaws, and definitely a few traps I have seen developers fall for in the past, but I’ll get to that later

A quick rundown of the story is in order really. You are put in the shoes of Bad Company, a team of four trope-y special forces soldiers. The first level opens putting you in the shoes of a 1944 band of similar characters, racing to extract a defecting Japanese scientist. As expected the whole battle goes awry, after a dramatic escape on a submarine, the team is conveniently killed off. As a side note, I expect to see this more often in games as pioneered by Call Of Duty Modern Warfare. It builds the emotion of a game to kill off the character the player has known and loved and fought alongside during the game.

Fastforward to the present, and Bad Company is negotiating a minefield in order to retrieve a package from the grasp of the enemy, led by a typically bald evil mastermind. Does his head get cold in all these shitty wintery town?
Blasting through this level was fun, the weather effects immersing you in the environment, with plenty of opportunities to test out the dynamic level design, and quite a few new weapons.
After blowing through the village, you commandeer the transport vehicle, and take off, pursued relentlessly by a stream of enemy vehicles (where were they when you were laying waste to their forces in the town? Smoko?)
I wont go further into the detail of the storyline, but its all a touch predictable. Maybe that was just my view as it does admittedly follow many of the conventions of a good storyline to build.

The level design troubled me somewhat in this game. I’m not sure why the particular environmental designer hated the player, but they really do. I love the physics engine, coupled with the destructible environments, but the environment itself is nearly unbearable.
I should point out that I am not playing this game on a low-spec machine, but neither is it a SLI or crossfire monster of graphics capability. I play on High graphics settings, 1280×1024. I have noticed a loss in framerate during very busy scenes, especially some of the jungle battles through the middle of the game, but otherwise it is quite acceptable.
Line of sight in the game can be a frustrating thing, if you’re in a desert? Its a sandstorm. A winter level? A whiteout (there is actually a small portion of an early level based around this, which was admittedly quite fun), if you’re in a jungle, its the bloody amazon.

I found this to be incredibly distracting, disadvantaging, and rather poor gameplay. I tend to think that because of the way the environment works, the designer has found that the only way to stop people sitting back and picking off their targets from a distance is to make the level design extremely ambush prone. Additionally, they have added so much haze/smoke/snow/sand/flare that I found myself squinting at the screen trying to make out the enemy goon five meters away who is pumping me full of death.
A very disappointing solution to what could be a much more elegantly solved problem. If I had my way, I would have switched out perhaps the last level (through the town) and also the level rescuing a certain team member (I will say no more) for night-battles and added the extra claustrophobia of night vision goggles and flashlights. This could have broken the pace of the game a lot, added a lot more depth to the tactics the player must use.

Enough ranting about the environment, my next two gripes are about the weapons and the NPC’s. Unfortunately, the NPC’s irritated me most, so they will be my first victim. To say your team is stupid would be a little of an understatement. I understand that this being a single player mission, you are expected to lead your team, but this game takes this to a point of pain at times. I don’t want to be the first person through that door? Oh well.. my team are back there somewhere negotiating a small rock that is inexplicably harder to conquer than Everest. Off I go to contract lead poisoning then.
The squad can be useful in many situations, mainly only as a diversion, and at times, a meat shield (they cannot die), but in others they can be plain obstructive. I would have really liked to see a context menu (similar to the multiplayer ‘issue orders’ menu), go here, stay there, kill this, hold fire etc included. By all means for 80% of the game I would have left them on ‘follow me and shut up’ but there were a number of situations where cover fire from just the right angle would have made a situation solvable with skill instead of plain luck and grenade spam.

Next up was the weapon layout. Ugh. I love a huge choice of weapons in multiplayer, but in single player this really sucks. The convenient ‘Supply crates’ everywhere, including deep within enemy territory, store all of the weapons you may have encountered in your travels. Completely unnecessary. I think with the exception of one level only, my two weapons were the XM8 and the T88 SR. The XM8 is well balanced, the grenade launcher a nifty (yet overpowered, I’ll get to that in a moment) addition, the T88 is lethal at any distance with one shot kills regardless of the enemy, or where the shot lands. The Sniper rifle is slow and uses far too much zoom (harking back to the aforementioned problem with visual distances in whiteouts), the heavy machine guns far too inaccurate, the submachine guns too underpowered for the balance of game this requires.

This is perhaps why the convenient weapon supply crates were included, so the player can experiment and have fun with their weapons. I tended to see a new gun, pick it up, put a few rounds into something then go right back to my old weapon.
I was dissapointed in the layout of the ammunition in the game. Far too many ammo crates were scattered throughout levels, to the point where I began seeing them as crates-cum-bunkers (they, as a gameplay element, are indestructible) with a built in supply of kickass. This allows you to at some points, swap right past your guns and go for the grenade launcher, and keep running back to the crate. Not good. Convenient, yes, good level design, not really. I would have much preferred two weapons (one heavy, one light) and a pistol, allowing the player to take the risk of pushing further on limited ammuniton, instead of returning to the crate as soon as they emptied a clip, which I found myself doing a lot.

Gameplay is varied, presenting the player with several (actually, short of a sea-battle), all, of the environments war takes place in the modern theaters of combat. I was happy to see they took some levels environmental factors and worked them into the story, the descent down the slopes of an icy mountain while fighting frostbite was especially clever. There were a number of parts of levels where I found myself unexpectedly presented with a situation I had no idea how to solve. More often than not, this meant looking around for the convenient rocket launcher I have come to expect.
I would have liked to see the developers work with the destroyable environments more, especially forcing the player to destroy/blow their way through buildings to move around would have been a nice addition to a few of the levels. There was even C4 in a number of places, but I found no obvious level situations requiring this.
The storyline has a suitable amount of development to maintain flow, including the required twists and turns, but some more explanation of who you are actually fighting would be nice. It seemed to be a mismatch between doo-rag wearing gangsters for hire, or crack squads of Russian SF soldiers. Another level design I enjoyed was ‘Sangre del Torro’. This level, set in the desert, presents the player with a vast number of suitable approaches to each objective, some of them easier than the others. Beware of going off-map, 10 seconds is sometimes barely enough to turn your dune buggy doing mach 1 around and get your ass back into friendly territory.

Overall, the game for me was quite enjoyable. I split it up over a day and a half or so, requiring a few breaks after the jungle, my eyes were starting to hurt from trying to see through the misty sun flare. I believe the singleplayer campaign provides a good opportunity for a new player to get to know the game, or for a storyline sucker to find out the next installment, but I wouldnt hold my breath for this feature alone. Poor level design in places, coupled with imbecilic NPC’s and a little skills padding in the way of weaponry and resupply points all make this a frustrating game to get involved in if you are looking for something to take your mind off the rape you will be served up once you have joined the online servers.

The TL:DR – Three out of five terrorists from me. Some bad level design and game play elements, but a reasonable story, fun characters and interesting situations all make this a good complement to the excellent multiplayer series that Battlefield has become.