Battlefield: Bad Company

THE BAD:
Voice acting is a little rough at times
Music shifts from fun and lighthearted to the dramatic music FPS are known for.
Few online maps and modes.

SUMMARY:
This is Bad Company, where they rake together all the troublemakers and insubordinates deemed "expendable" by the U.S. army. You assume the role of Preston Marlowe, a red blooded American from a military family who got a little bored sitting around and decided to go looking for excitement. Well, B-Company's a lot of things, but boring ain't one of 'em.

The story follows Preston and his squad mates as they take on the Legionnaire and "the deadliest army in the world" for, what else, personal gain. To be more precise, the gold bars that the Legionnaire uses as payment for his mercenary army. Preston joins with Redford, the down to earth Sergeant that, in a very not down to earth decision, transferred to B-Company on his own request, apparently the only man ever to do so, Sweetwater, the cautious, almost nerdy type that joined the army to pay for his college. Unfortunately, he seems to have released a virus into the Army's database, which probably didn't help, and now is in a squad that he thinks is more likely to kill him than the enemy. The source of this belief is Pvt. Haggard, Bad Company's born demolitions expert who "just likes to blow stuff up".

The draw of Battlefield: Bad Company isn't its story or its characters though. The real draw is the environment. Many times you will walk into a nice small town that, five minutes after your arrival, will look like a broken, bombed out hellhole. The source of this endless source of enjoyment is the Frostbite engine, rendering a full 90% everything you see. Want to enter a house, but don't walk around to the door? Just pull out your Rocket Launcher and blow a hole in the side. Are you taking fire from all sides but can't see the snipers in the treeline? Fell free to use the Grenade Launcher to fell the forest. But don't limit yourself to standing structures. Need some quick cover in the middle of a wide open field? Use a pack or two (or, maybe five) of C4 to blow a nice 4 foot deep crater in the ground. Tah-Dah! Instant foxhole. The best thing though? All this destructibility transfers to the online mode.

Everybody loves online. Nothing beats the thrill of knowing you just Fragged someone thousands of mile away and their cursing you with enough hatred to make Satan wince. But doing so has never been more fun! Say you see a sniper hiding in the window. In other online games, you could kill him, but chances are he'll respawn, come back to the same window, and continue to rip through your ranks. Not when you do things the Bad Company way. Instead of just removing the sniper threat, why don't you remove his little hiding spot to. For that matter, lets just remove the entire building, just to be sure. This kind of "tactical destruction" is only available in Battlefield: Bad Company. Currently the online provides only a single game mode, but the Conquest mode from Battlefield 2 is on the way with the maps already available, just in a slightly different format. The class system provides five classes, each with its own weapons and abilities that you can unlock.

Now, we must come to the inevitable downsides, the most annoying of which is the voice acting. While the characters are fun and engaging, some lines just aren't performed as well as the could've been, and some are just plain bad. This isn't over the top, but is there enough to make you wish they'd paid just a little more attention to it.

One of the things I loved in the demo was the music. Instead of the dramatic, symphony pieces present in most FPS games these days, it featured a bluesy, swing like music and I loved it. I earnestly hoped that it would be present in the full game to. I was disappointed. After the first level (which featured the same music from the demo at the main menu) the music turned to a more dramatic theme. The worst part was that every levels theme sounded similar. After level one, they all were just variations of each other, and none were very good. It was bad enough to make me scramble through the menus in order to start a game so I wouldn't have to listen to it.

In the online, my only complaint could be the low number of maps and the single game mode option. With only 8 maps and the Gold Rush mode, the online seems a little threadbare at first, but is a very engaging experience. While many games promote online matches as never being the same twice, Bad Company delivers better than any of them. After all, you never know what will be destroyed in a game.

Finally, the fact that the gameplay can get slightly repetitive offline. The various weapons in a class are all similar and can be used efficiently in the same way. The only guns that have much change at all and the shotguns, which provide either a magazine reload method or a shell reload method, and the sniper rifles, with the option of bolt action for power and bullet speed, or semi-auto that grants faster firing speed, less noise and doesn't require you to look away from the scope to ready the next bullet, but delivers less power and a slower moving shot (slow enough that you watch it travel towards your enemy).

All in all, Battlefield: Bad Company is a worthy game, both online and off. Though the campaign is a little short and repetitive, it is solid and provides quite a lot of game time to find all the extra collectibles and gold. The online has a good life span to, with various guns and gadgets to unlock and several vehicles to master including tanks, jeeps and helicopters.

Gameplay- 8 Great fun, huge levels, and lots of various strategies to try, although it gets a wee bit repetitive.

Graphics- 9 Excellent quality on everything from water to faces.

Features- 10 Lots of online life and everything you see can be blown up. What else is there to say?

Sound- 8 Voice acting is good, but could be better at times. Music isn't well done after initial level, but the radios in the cars have good channels.

Vitality- 10 Even though I've made multiple statements of repetitiveness, I can't deny that you will want to play through multiple times, both to get all the collectibles and just to blow crap up. Go ahead, everyone's gonna do it and the online would be worth all the money alone if it had a few more levels.

Final Score- 90%