You know, it's so rare that my job feels like work. I mean, I play and write about video games for a living -- it's not a terribly taxing gig. I mention this not to brag about how great my life is (Twitter's the only appropriate place for that), but so you have some perspective when I tell you that almost every moment of Battlefield: Bad Company 2's single-player campaign felt like real, actual work. Show The campaign isn't terrible, in fact, it's largely competent. But because of a lack of inspiration and a pretty crummy checkpoint system, Bad Company 2's single-player game is just plain not fun. %Gallery-43916% You'll once again step into the boots of Preston Marlowe (don't worry, I didn't remember his name either) as he continues his enlistment with the other Bad Company misfits. Moving away from the cloudy mortality and greed-based motivation of the first game, this is a much more straightforward story of the pursuit of an incredibly powerful mystery weapon that's been stolen by an evil Russian. Though your team may be more quirky than the Modern Warfare 2 dudes, their utility (doing crazy Special Forces missions when all others fail) now seems to be pretty much the same. I'm being vague, but it's not to keep you from any spoilers. The story's all over the place, both geographically and structurally. You're shooting all these guys because they're keeping you from the superweapon. The end. The big selling point of the first game, destructible environments, returns here, but while the sight of building materials exploding around you is one to behold it never makes the kind of impact on the action you'd hope for. It's cool when you have to move out of cover when it's been destroyed by a rocket launcher, but using the same tactics on the enemy is rarely as effective as just shooting them in the head when they jump out from behind the roadblock or wall they're hiding behind. "You swore you didn't leave the oven on!" This is a common thread in Bad Company 2: the few things it does that you haven't seen before it just doesn't do very well. It should be fun attacking the enemy as a squad, but the rest of the "Bad" Company is both bad at aiming and bad at taking cover. Watching your crack team rush into the open, get turned into Swiss cheese by enemy fire while managing to kill no one does little for immersion; and it should be interesting fighting on a team of unbalanced screw-ups, but they rarely feel like more than idiosyncratic quote machines; and fighting in a city being destroyed all around you should be cool, but you spend so much time firing blindly into debris smoke (which never seems to cause problems for your enemies) that it's little more than irritating. The vast majority of the stages just feel like one missed opportunity after another. There are a couple of sequences that are both original and well-executed like a stage that's so bitterly cold you have to run from shelter to shelter, warming yourself at fires along the way. There are also some nice dialog moments from your squad, but listening to these conversations usually requires standing still for extended periods of time as you wait for the exchanges to be triggered. The banter is occasionally funny, but I couldn't help but wish it had been more organically integrated. On the rare occasion that Bad Compnay 2's campaign manages to rise above mediocrity, the enjoyment's short-lived thanks to the reprehensible lengths between checkpoints. In a later stage, I played the same seven or eight minutes three times in a row because I was taken out by a random sniper shot or rocket the first two times. I would stare at the loading screen each time just positive I wasn't going to start back at the beginning of the level again, and I was always disappointed. You'd be shocked at how quickly that kind of frustration can sully an otherwise inoffensive experience. Worse, it's hard to feel like it's anything other than a cynical attempt to artificially lengthen an admittedly brief campaign. If you're horrified as you read this because you've had such an amazing time with the multiplayer, I can only urge you to cling to that love. By all means, if you're enjoying yourself as much as Alexander did, stay there and have fun with your friends! But should your curiosity get the best of you (say, when the online servers collapse for several hours or so), be warned that us lonely hearts in the single-player game aren't enjoying ourselves nearly as much. PC gamers have been waiting since 2005 for a spiritual follow up to the classic Battlefield 2. There has been an actual follow up, Battlefield 2142, but the less said about that the better. When the first Bad Company appeared as a console exclusive in 2008 and little more was seen or heard about the BF franchise apart from the oddball Battlefield: Heroes and the budget console frag-fest Battlefield 1943 it was almost looking as though DICE was going to leave us hanging. But no, it’s here. Battlefield: Bad Company 2. It looks like Battlefield 2 and it plays a lot like Battlefield 2 - stick the fatted calf on the grill, our prodigal franchise is home.  The key difference between Bad Company 2 and the Battlefield games that PC players will be used to is the presence of an orthodox single player campaign, rather than just a big pile of multiplayer maps. This story revolves around the titular Bad Company squad, an elite four man special forces team on a mission. We’ll not say much more than that about the specifics, because if we mention that there’s a race against time to prevent the use of a super weapon we’ll pretty much have told you the whole thing. Oops. Frankly the story could not be more unoriginal if it tried to be. Nor could the characters, from the oddball helicopter pilot (when was a helicopter pilot ever not quirky?) to the assorted good natured grunts that make up the team it’s all done exactly by the numbers. Equally, there is almost no explanation of the earlier games events either, so it’s just as well that it’s all nice and simple. Your own character is not explained beyond having a name, Preston Marlowe. By the normal run of things such a lazy effort with the story would be grounds for a panning but what Bad Company 2 manages to pull off is that rare trick of making it all fun, despite the cheese. Pure, mindless destruction and fun over eleven missions, like an extended episode of the A-Team except you actually hit the people you’re shooting at. Missions take you all over the world but take a traditional form, corridors of one sort or another leading to large open fights, interspersed by plot related dialogue, scripted events and the odd bit of vehicle action. The shooting from a moving vehicle sections when they come up are about as dull and repetitive as they were when they first appeared around the turn of the century, but the parts of the game when you’re actually driving are great fun and the vehicles handle really well. There are some little twists to the basic game play dropped in from time to time too, such as having to keep an eye out for tripwires or having to snipe sentries without alerting their comrades. Is Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on PC?Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by DICE and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, iOS, Android and Kindle Fire systems. It is a direct sequel to Battlefield: Bad Company and is part of the Battlefield game series. Does Battlefield: Bad Company 2 have a good campaign?If you were to buy Bad Company 2 solely for the single-player campaign, you might come away a bit disappointed. That's not to say it's particularly bad in any way, but it doesn't feel impressive enough to stand on its own as a great experience. Once again, the multiplayer game is the star of the Battlefield show. Are Battlefield: Bad Company 2 servers still up 2023?Seven EA games saw their online services shuttered on Friday, December 8, 2023, with four of those available on PC until then. Absolute classics like Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Dead Space 2 were among them, and some of these can't even be purchased on digital storefronts anymore either. Is Battlefield 2 a good game?The depth and quality here is just staggering, and you won't find a better multiplayer shooter on the PC. Much like the real military, Battlefield 2 is not just a game, it's a way of life. When people get together and play as a team, the game truly shines. |
