Jul 3
Review: Battlefield: Bad Company (PS3)
Remember the old days when first-person shooters were a fairly uncommon occurrence? I’m talking about the early 90’s when a game like Doom was able to garner tons of attention and an adoring fan base because of its graphical prowess and innovative gameplay. Sadly, those days are over. Go to your local GameStore and look on the shelves; you’ll find that they’re cluttered with FPS titles, and most of them are half-assed attempts to earn a buck. Sure, you’ll occasionally stumble on the likes of Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4, but for the most part the FPS genre has become tired and played-out.
While Bad Company goes a little beyond the multitude of half-assed FPSs, it still falls short of a full-assed game. Hit the jump for the full review.
After seeing some of the videos that were put out featuring the Bad Company parodying Gears of War, Rainbow Six, and Metal Gear Solid, I was itching to dig into the campaign mode. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to dig into. The whole thing took me a measly 5 hours to beat, but I’m sure I could rush through it in under 2 hours. This might be forgivable if the story they put in place was actually completed by the end of the campaign. You see, the game follows 4 characters: Haggard, a greedy southerner with explosion-lust, Sweetwater, a techie that “accidentally” downloaded a virus onto military machines, Redford, the sergeant of B-Company who took the job to shorten his term, and Preston Marlowe, the player-controlled protagonist who never gives a reason for landing in B-Company beyond a mention that whatever he did was unspeakable. The basic plot that brings these characters together is that there’s a guild of assassins that have a bunch of gold and B-Company decides to go after it instead of follow military orders. While this bit of the story is technically resolved at the end, it seems like the developers figured, “hell, that’s a long enough campaign. Let’s wrap this shit up!”
While the characters are interesting and funny at first, they don’t develop much beyond what I described in the last paragraph. It would have been nice to at least find out why Preston landed in Bad Company or who the identity of the sexy voice on the troop’s communicator is. Story aside, though, the campaign is a fun-but-repetitive experience, with nearly every mission being either getting to a checkpoint or clearing an area of enemies.
Of course, like most FPS games these days, the focus is more on the multiplayer experience than the campaign. I felt that Bad Company’s multiplayer options were extremely lacking. There’s only one playable mode: attackers and defenders, where you’re thrust into a fight to obtain or defend cases of gold. It’s fun for a while, but with only one mode it gets stale quickly. In fact, the only variation I noticed in the several matches that I played was that there are a few different classes to pick from, though the only real difference there is that you get a different gun to shoot people with. Some may argue that the different maps and vehicles add some flavor, but I felt like I was playing the same match over… and over… and over again. It doesn’t help that every map has the same dusty brown coloring and identical buildings scattered across them, or that there is no real variation in the vehicles placed at your base, or especially that you wind up doing the exact same mission every match you play. Worst of all, the PS3 version has absolutely zero voice chat support, which makes it impossible to organize with your teammates.
For all its faults, though, Bad Company still pulls together as a decent game. The gameplay mechanics are solid and it manages to deliver an overall fun experience. Still, I would avoid paying full price for this game and, if given the option, I would get it for the 360 so that I could actually talk to my teammates.
12 Comments so far
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Glad I didn’t put money down on this after all. You hit the nail on the head about multiplayer (at least what I experienced in the demo). All I could think about when playing it was how I could be playing CoD4 instead.
I have to disagree for one reason when people play this they think of a COD 4 rip off but.. didn’t COD rip off Battlefield in the first place.. just saying.
No voice chat on the PS3? No wonder people still pay for XBox Live.
To Kag: I didn’t mean for it to sound like Bad Company is a COD4 ripoff, just that they’re both similar in a lot of aspects and in my experience COD4 has more to offer in multi
Wasn’t this by Wonko last time I saw it? Are you one and the same?
@Dexter345
Yeah, they’re the same person.
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BAD COMPANY has voice chat support on the PS3. you stupid fuck. if you couldn’t even get that right, what the fuck good is anything else spewing outta your retard rejected stank ass.