RESUMO: Um jogo bem satisfatorio de zerar, com inicio, meio e fim bem definidos. Com toda certeza fica de igual para igual com vários COD'S no quesito campanha.

JOGABILIDADE: Um tanto travada por causa da época que foi lançado, mas não atrapalha na experiência.

ROTEIRO: Por ser um jogo meio "antigo" meio que relevei essa parte, ele tem vários clichês e conveniências de roteiro, mas para um jogo de 2010 realmente conseguiu me prender e gostar dos personagens apresentados.

GRÁFICOS: Nada de mais, porém com cénarios realmente bem trabalhados. (Considerando 2010).

Embarrassing.

Way back about a decade and a half ago, in the salad days of the seventh-generation of console shooters, debates raged in high schools all across the West. The teenaged gaming masses congregated around their lunch tables and pounded back Monster energy drinks, each one more certain in their position than the last. ”Halo or Call of Duty?”, they would ask. It was a challenge more than it was an actual question; are you with us, or are you against us? Call of Duty was a bit faster, and Halo was a bit more rewarding for tactical play, but the games were so fundamentally different that there wasn’t much real point to the arguments. Nobody was about to have their mind changed. Black Ops and Halo: Reach dropped around the same time and subsequently marked the conflict’s denouement; everyone had chosen and then dug into their respective sides. Lines had been drawn, and that was that. There was nobody left who could still be converted to the other side. With that, games discussion eventually moved on to other and more intellectually-stimulating topics, such as which Mass Effect girl was the most fuckable, or who had the coolest fatality in Mortal Kombat 9.

You know what nobody ever fucking talked about? Battlefield.

Honestly, given the glut of shooters and the intensity of the arguments surrounding them, you’d think there would have been at least one guy at one lunch table somewhere who interrupted the Call of Duty vs. Halo talk to mention that he preferred Battlefield 2142. But no, there wasn’t. Not really. Not until Battlefield 3, at least, but that was long after the debates had started fading into background noise. Battlefield was just kind of hanging out in its own weird lane, a little bit too arcade-y for the simulator fans, and a little bit too fucking annoying with the bullet drop for the twitchy, greasy teenagers. As someone who grew up in that period and went to war with my friends over how Halo was gay and how Call of Duty was badass (it had Ghost), Battlefield had the vibe of something my dad would have enjoyed, and not in a cool way. It was the Kid Rock American Badass of shooters.

Anyway, much like my dad, Bad Company 2 has a bit of a complex about looking old and lame next to contemporary early-10s shooter slop. One sequence where you’re lost in the snow has a character say that they can’t turn back because they’ll be replaced by guys with pussy-ass heartbeat monitors on their guns, like in Modern Warfare 2. Another set piece where you race quad bikes with your squad has a guy complain that he would be winning if you were on snowmobiles, to which another character quips that snowmobiles are for pussies. You know, like in Modern Warfare 2. There’s a sequence where an EMP goes off, fries all of the surrounding technology, makes helicopters fall out of the sky, and has your squad leader mention that all of the electronics are broken, like in Modern Warfare 2. Unlike in Modern Warfare 2, however, your holographic sights still work just fine, making the whole sequence feel both like a complete ripoff and lazy to boot.

There’s nothing wrong with stealing ideas. Really, I don’t think it’s as much of a crime to be unoriginal as a lot of people make it out to be. What I do have a problem with, however, is when you intentionally keep drawing comparisons to other media, brag about how much better or cooler you are, and then wind up being unquestionably the worse of the two. Don’t be a poser. It’s embarrassing. Bad Company 2 has what I’d like to call ”Duke Nukem Forever syndrome”. Yeah, I sure do hate Valve puzzles. Power armor really is for pussies. Hey, Duke, while you’ve got a minute, your game fucking sucks. Can you try and make it better before you start taking shots at things that are infinitely more exciting, enjoyable, and sincere than you are? The same applies here. Please, shut the fuck up about how much better you are than Modern Warfare 2. You aren't, and if you stopped talking about Modern Warfare 2, I wouldn't be sitting here wishing I was playing that instead. You don't get points for preempting criticisms people are going to make of your game and then leaving them in there anyway. If you're aware enough to point out that what you're doing isn't distinct enough to distance yourself from your competition on its own, then why aren't you changing anything?

The answer, really, is that this was a strange time in which everything that was releasing had some publisher-ordered mode hanging off of it like a vestigial bone. It was the era of the tack-on. Games couldn’t just be single-player. They needed to have a shitty afterthought multiplayer mode that shipped with it. They couldn’t just be multiplayer, either, so you needed to hook a shitty afterthought single-player mode onto it, too. I don’t get the feeling that DICE wanted to make a campaign. Hell, I don’t think anyone really cared about it. I’ve got some buddies who owe their friendship to Bad Company 2 purely because it was where they all met, and every single one of them I talked to about this game expressed surprise that it even had a single-player mode. I suppose that’s the greatest indictment anyone could give; for anything to be so forgettable that the people it's most important to can’t even remember it existing.

On that note, one of those same friends said he was going to kill me if I gave this a bad score, because the multiplayer was "just that good". Regrettably, then, the multiplayer for this game is completely in the grave due to EA taking it off of their digital storefronts months ago and announcing that the servers will be gone by this time next month. By 2024, the only part of this game you’ll actually be able to play is the campaign, and it’s definitely not the mode that I would have wanted to preserve if I was the EA executive who had to make that call. What a shame. Oh, well.

This is written like someone told an eighth grader to make a story about the military.

The multiplayer shines here as there's a lot of QOL improvements made over the first game, as well as narrowing down the classes to 4, which provided balance and really encouraged diversity among squads and/or teams to achieve the objective.

The campaign was nothing to write home about. Although I did appreciate this game being more linear than the first (one gripe that I had about BC1 was the wasted time of having to travel back and forth across the map), by completing it in 2 sessions it felt too concise and to the point.

Strictly from a story mode perspective, this game is a fairly average modern military fps. That might frustrate a lot of people to hear, but any fondness you have for the story mode is strictly nostalgia. A stereotypical squad of hoo-ah hoo-ah bros begins to unravel a decades old secret weapon the Russians are trying to utilize for no discernable reason. Half of the game you will be fighting what appears to be a south american pmc for no reason at all? Near the end you'll also begin to feel the copy-pasted layouts of the housing interiors. Despite all that, there is one aspect I would be remise for not mentioning: the environmental destruction. I fully think that this is why the game was made. Destroying soft cover to melt enemies behind it, collapsing buildings with grenade launchers, this is all very satisfying. While I did not play the multiplayer on this playthrough (I will not subject myself to hours of painstaking matchmaking with horrible internet) I do fondly remember the dozens of hours I spent playing it when I was younger. Hardly a match went by that a whole building would remain standing. Truly an irreplaceable experience that had a scale and interactivity that is hardly matched these days.