Battlefield: Bad Company

Welcome to Bad Company. The specialist branch of the US Military, for... specialists. Blown up the wrong building? Hacked computers and accidentally caused a system meltdown? Then to Bad Company you go. Which actually, is no bad thing.

As Preston Marlow, you have been sent to B Company to join the other reprobates, for some shenanigous crime against the military. And fighting alongside your team you must kill lots of terrorists/Russians for some reason, finding some Gold in the process (Three Kings might well act as an excellent synopsis). While the whole story is nothing epic, it does provide the basis for what Bad Company excels at - the characters.

For the first time in a long time, within seconds of meeting your team you like them. So well written and so well acted are your squad buddies (both in voice and animation) that it is nigh on impossible to dislike this game. The whole atmosphere, the music and the situations engineered work brilliantly to give the whole game a decent war movie feel, easily setting Bad Company miles ahead of all the other shooters out there.

The game play itself, while not wholly revolutionary, there is a fairly solid shooter here. Battlefield games have always been about huge sprawling maps and hundreds of enemies. Bad Company is no different, although this time is largely a single player affair. Sprawling landscapes stretch for miles, filled with little towns and farms in which to fight and destroy. Which is the other nice little touch - all buildings can be (and usually are) destroyed. Meaning that there is nowhere to hide. Not for long anyway.

It's here that the game starts to breakdown though. In an effort to make the gameplay as hectic and gung-ho as possible, the developers have introduced two fatal flaws. One is a massive abundance of ammo - you are never short of bullets or explosives. And with every single building apparently being a store for all of the terrorists volatile barrels/boxes - it really is a hectic, explodey movie like game. Secondly, probably again to keep you rushing in, you are effectively immortal. Not only do you have a magic stick of health, which never runs out. But if you do somehow forget to use it when you are near death, and so do 'die', you will just respawn slightly behind where you were - with all the death and destruction you just dealt still in place. Making you effectively the world’s best suicide bomber.

Which is a huge shame. Bad Company is an excellent game otherwise, written well, good looking and the whole shooting bit does work solidly. On top of all this there are loads of little touches that add to the package. But the games obsession with making you explode things means it can get a bit repetitive and with death only being a minor inconvenience any challenge there might have been has gone.

So much so in fact, that in the end it's possible you could find yourself only playing on to get some more chat from your mates. Which is good, but also not. Once you have seen one explosion, you've seen them all.

Bad Company is a game for shooter fans, for sure. It is fun, and it is worth playing for the writing/acting/animation and general style of the game if nothing else. And while there are lots of good things here, it's just a bit of a shame that the experience isn't quite as compelling as you would hope for.