This is a review by Barnsy

No matter the hype, no matter how good people tell me its going to be ultimately I’m wary of sequels. There have been too many cash in sequels that either take away what was brilliant about the first game or take the game in a direction that tarnishes earlier experiences.

The story in the first Bad Company was, in my eyes brilliant, it had a different feel to most modern, gritty shooters and injected a real sense of humour and light heartedness into what would otherwise have just been another very well polished first person shooter.

Now onto the sequel. When I started to read early hands on information about BC2 and watched the first few teaser trailers I was a little bit worried. To borrow a Heath Ledger quote ‘why so serious’… all the talk surrounding BC2 was that EA and Dice were gunning for Infinity Ward and Modern Warfare and I must admit that I was a little concerned that BC was going to lose its unique selling point and just become another shooter. Everything from plot to action appeared to be a more serious game that left the humour and warmth of the characters firmly at the door in exchange for a darker experience.

Fortunately I was to be relieved when playing through the single player campaign, the humour is still there, the throwaway conversations between B Company is still as funny and genuinely has some laugh out loud moments (mostly involving Haggard the heavy weapons loving Texan gun nut.) and there are more than a few tongue in cheek digs at the story in MW2 along the way ‘We’re not a bunch of whiny bitches with Heart Beat Sensors’ for one.

I won’t talk too much about the plot or story that develops along the way but as an overview the single player is well paced with a good combination of Stealth, Gun Battles, free roam vehicle sections and on rails vehicle battles, there is no point in the game that feels contrived or excessively difficult for the sake of it. With the on foot sections the game gives you many ways to complete objectives which segways me nicely into one of the best parts of the Frostbite engine the game uses. Destruction 2.0.

Now for anyone who played the first game you’ll know that it featured a fairly significant level of destruction, buildings, trees, even leaving deformation craters from large explosions. Now where Destruction 2.0 comes in is that in the original whilst you could decimate buildings you’d still be left with a steel framework that seemed to be completely indestructible even to the heaviest of aerial bombardment. In BC2 you can now bring down the entire building crashing onto the heads of anyone who wasn’t fast enough to get out in time! (And yes, before you ask I’ve dropped them on my own head.)

There are still some inconsistencies with this such as you can drop a stone building to rubble but the framework of a timber portacabin will stay standing no matter what you do!

The single player is a comfortable 8-10 hours (even longer if you take your time and look for all the unlocks, guns, etc..) but it’s almost just a taster for the main crux of the game.

Multiplayer.

If Bad Company 1 was a game to hook people with a good story and then wean them into onine then lets not kid ourselves this is battlefield game. Just look at the box art, the big BATTLEFIELD that obscures the Bad Company sitting under it. The multiplayer is expanded from the original and now has 4 game modes (BC1 shipped with only one game mode which was later expanded to 2 by DLC)

The 4 modes are:

Conquest (basic domination game mode)
Squad Death match (4 v 4 v 4 v 4 first to 50 kills wins!)
Rush & Squad Rush, Rush (and its smaller cousin squad Rush which only involves 4v4 combat) is a basic attack and defend game mode with 2 crates that need to be detonated to ‘clear’ the base. Which opens up the next base further back with the next 2 crates. The attackers must clear all the bases to win, the defenders must simply eliminate all of the ‘lives’ the attackers have before they destroy the crates.