Game reviews: Battlefield: Bad Company 2

In the world of war-based video games, there are two opposing camps: Battlefield vs Call Of Duty.

Accepted wisdom holds that Call of Duty is a great all-rounder, with good single-player campaigns and a fun but conventional multiplayer. In the Battlefield series, by contrast, single player is okay but it’s almost an afterthought, while the squad-based multiplayer is about as sophisticated and satisfying as you’ll find in the gaming world.

This time, however, things are differe… Oh, actually, they’re exactly the same, more or less. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (reviewed in Tone 80) still has a better single player campaign, but Battlefield: Bad Company 2 continues to own online. That is if you don’t minds spending your time in a ceaseless spawn/die/spawn/die cycle as teams of 11-year-olds with vastly superior skills pick you off at their leisure.

And newcomers shouldn’t underestimate how difficult this game can be when playing online. That’s not the fault of developer DICE, by the way, which in the last few iterations of the Battlefield franchise has worked hard to make gameplay as balanced as possible. But as well as the aforementioned youthful deadeyes, the confusion and sensory overload of finding yourself in the middle of a firefight can be overwhelming.

For all that, and like CoD, there is little new here; Bad Company 2 is a game of tweaks that all make playing it that little bit more satisfying. A graphical polish here, an intriguingly designed map there, a reworked game mode…

Unlike its rival, however, DICE has made a well-publicised point of providing dedicated servers for online play, which CoD developer Infinity Ward failed to do, and it means a smoother multiplayer experience.

In another little dig at Call of Duty, the characters in BC2 mention in one campaign scene that there are no snowmobiles. Hey, I liked the snowmobile sequence of MW2… RB

FOUR STARS

PLATFORM REVIEWED: PS3

PLAYERS: 1-24

RATING: 16

GENRE: First-person shooter