While Bad Company 2’s multiplayer is clearly the star of the show, its schlocky campaign still holds up as comfort food for players
with nostalgia for that era of shooters. The story is a paint by numbers military tale and the characters are living embodiments of genre tropes, but it is all pulled off with a wink and a nod. It is a kindness for the game to forgo the usual self-serious, jingoistic tone of modern warfare shooters for goofballs and overarching cynicism. The game knows that the story and characters just grease the wheels of what players are really here for, wanton destruction.

And Bad Company 2 delivers, offering up perhaps the most thoroughly destructible environments in a Battlefield game, let alone its peers in the genre. Everything blows to bits at a moment's notice, including a player's cover. It is immediately immersive to have all of your cover blown away in an instant, sending you in the frantic search for more. The campaign seems tailored to provide a multitude of ways of experiencing this core loop. Add the impeccable sound design and a wide variety of good feeling weapons, and its easy to get caught up in the experience. And overlook the fact that your adversary is entirely mindless.

Boneheaded enemy AI is not the extent of the campaign’s flaws either. The most glaring issue it has is the odd scripting it uses at times, in which events trigger to unfairly kill the player or leave them in a lurch because enemies spawned late when the player is advancing out of cover. It is also an extremely linear game which makes it abundantly clear that the player is almost always being directly funneled to the next thing. And while the variety of guns are enjoyable and provide different distances by which players can engage enemies, the solution to every problem is to start the firefight.

This explosive, breakneck ride is the tailored experience Bad Company 2 has to offer though. And, for its flaws, it is still a hell of a ride if you have fond memories of its brand of campaign. Just be sure to go in with expectations set around what it wants to be.

As a side note, it is worth mentioning that the multiplayer is just as enjoyable as it ever was. All the strengths of the campaign find their way into the multiplayer, with the improvement of playing against real people, generally with brains. Unfortunately, finding a full match can be hit or miss, but generally at least a partially full lobby can be found.

A further author’s note: the score is taking the whole package into account. If scored separately, the campaign would be at 4/5, multiplayer 4.5/5.

Ahhh…the tired old FPS genre. Everyone loves it and then everyone hates it. What more can developers do to change the FPS genre to make it interesting? Better graphics? Better sounds? More realistic AI? Realistic physics? Less linear? Keep the linearity? More vehicles? Better story? The list goes on and on, and the answer is yes to all of the above.

Bad Company 2 is a sequel of the first, but the first game was pretty forgettable. You play as a squad of four soldiers who were military rejects and must earn their freedom or face the slammer. They are sent into Africa and other parts of the world to find some sort of scalar weapon that the Russians found from Japan and are using it for global domination. Not something we haven’t seen before, but the squad has great characters that you’ll love and hearing their banter is enough to keep playing.


A lot of people are comparing Bad Company 2 to Modern Warfare 2 and if I were to pick the better game? Bad Company 2 for single player and realism, and Modern Warfare 2 for multiplayer, but then again I’m not comparing the two so let’s get down to it. The first thing you will notice is how real Bad Company 2 feels more so than any other shooter so far. The sounds are just amazing with the sound of fire echoing off caverns, the sounds of you reloading echoing in a building, the pinging of bullet shells hitting the floor, everything sounds like it would in life and is placed accordingly unlock most (if not all) shooters real or not. The foliage looks real and everything blows up. You can blow pretty much anything up in the game with anything you can get hold of. This is also used in gameplay when getting around turrets that you can’t shoot through. Find some red barrels and blow the building up, then have it collapse on everyone below it. This goes for radio towers, telephone poles, and large trees. Then again it’s pretty stupid when you can blow apart small objects like trash cans, chairs, or cardboard boxes, so it’s very strange.

The weapon selection in the game is great, and you get all your real-world guns and they fire like they should. The guns feel powerful, and everything about shooting feels dead on. Gone, however, is the whole healing thing and instead you just hide in cover to heal. Another element stripped is finding the gold bars, but instead, M-COM stations that you blow up, and finding weapons. The M-COM stations are hard to find, and I don’t know where all the hidden weapons could be, but they’re there for people who like that stuff. I personally hate finding crap in shooters like this since it detracts from the experience and pulls you out. Other than that though the game is paced nicely and flows just right.


There are some elements that haven’t been down before like the whole blowing up everything in your path (in an FPS anyway) and there’s even one level where you will freeze to death if you don’t find shelter fast. This level has you knifing doors open as you race down a hillside. There some epic vehicle sections (that hasn’t been done before), but there is one level that isn’t linear that has three checkpoints and you can choose which ones you want to do first. The opening level is even from WWII in Japan so the game is full of surprises and is a blast to play.

When it comes to multiplayer the game is solid with three modes of play, but my favorite is Rush. Like in the original game you have an attacker and defender side on a huge map (this one supports 64 players). You have five different classes to choose from and you can customize them as you please. There are 3 “perks” that you can use at a time, but they must be unlocked and this takes awhile. The multiplayer is fast, intense, and fun with lots of vehicles zooming around, everything blowing up, and people just being crazy.


My last words here must be how amazing the game looks. Probably being the best-looking shooter around it looks great technically, but has no artistic style and is just “real life” type of stuff, so it’s not for everyone. If you want a really amazing shooter to play and are bored of Modern Warfare 2 pick up Bad Company 2 because of its one hell of a ride.

LIMITED EDITION: If you pick up the game anyone soon you can still get the limited edition that has 6 multiplayer unlocks and entitles you to upcoming maps for free. A deal? I’d say with it being the standard price and no additional charge. So find a new copy if you can.

Sometimes you just need some of that good ol' "wipe the jam out of your eyes", "every level gets a bespoke turret sequence", "Hoo-rah america", "kind of jank PC port" sort of fps. The writing is honestly pretty funny a lot of the time, and the environmental destruction stuff holds up fine, even if the dust and smoke makes every fight look like an N64 game where you've gotta shoot 1 of 3 models of russian soldier/south american guerilla before they blast you with an RPG through the impenetrable fog.