Ripten Review: Battlefield: Bad Company 2

In the world of video game journalism, some things are perceived to be self evident. If a game is awful but you need to make sure the company keeps sending you stuff- you give it a 7, if you are the review that bumps a game’s Metacritic rating down a peg- be prepared for hate mail, and if a game comes out that has shooting in it make sure you compare it to other games with shooting in it no matter how tenuous the thread between the two is.

Because of that, I decided I was going to do something drastic. When I finally pried myself away from the ungodly amount of great titles that have came out since November and got around to actually adding my opinion to the noise, I wasn’t going to compare Bad Company 2 to any other game. Instead, I will simply tell you about the exploits of the soldier I created for Bad Company 2.

Thus, kind readers of Ripten, let me introduce you to [USA!]Scott Welch. Virtual all-American Badass.

Except when he is on the Russian side.

You see, with every game series in existence clamoring about how their next iterations will be MMOs, I figured I would jump the gun a bit by entering into my Battlefield: Bad Company 2 experience like it were already a MMO. In order to do this, I have to take my soldier creating more seriously. Since Bad Company 2 doesn’t contain many cosmetic customization elements, I figured I would have to set my character apart in a different way, the most important way- through enormous amounts of destruction.

If there is one thing that Bad Company 2 has in spades, it is destruction. While the multiplayer sets itself apart from the white noise of the genre for many other reasons, the sheer destructibility of the maps add such a great layer of strategy to every game and is what helps to make the Bad Company 2 experience so consistently entertaining. [USA!]Scott Welch takes advantage of this quite often by never using a door or window, instead choosing to make his own entry ways into every building so he can enter like the unstoppable machine he is. It is great to be able to blast a hole in a wall and go in shooting instead of having to throw your corpse at a single entry point and hope a whole pile of you will eventually distract the people camping the door way, especially when you are an explosive wielding juggernaut like [USA!]Scott Welch.

“It must have been a woman driver,” Scott Welch says, laughing. Nobody around him could muster up any laughter, as he had already killed them all quite sufficiently.

Thanks to that destructibility, as well as a few other gameplay decisions like the inability to go prone, [USA!]Scott Welch doesn’t have to worry about people camping, he only has to worry about making sure everything he does is absolutely bad ass. Which it is. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has so much bad ass in it that it actually might end up getting bad ass all over your Berber rug. [USA!]Scott Welch doesn’t worry about overflowing bad ass either. While the game might not be balanced for prone, making it incredibly difficult for one person to dig in somewhere keeps the game moving. On a well populated server it is entirely impossible for there to be a slow paced game.

This means that [USA!]Scott Welch always has an opportunity to flex his bubble gum chewing muscles, which are inherently linked to his ass kicking muscles. Bad Company 2 seems to pride itself with avoiding any grinding drag, since every game can end up being so different from the ones before it. This is further enhanced by the tactical differences between the games four main classes. While [USA!]Scott Welch may prefer the late stage burst fire rifles with the godlike magnum ammo, sometimes it will make more sense for a role change. Bad Company 2 players are encouraged and rewarded by the gameplay to change things up and cycle between classes as the battle changes. More often than not you will find yourself attacking as an assault class, providing support as a medic, taking out an entrenched tank as an engineer, and scouting for weaknesses in enemy defenses as a recon all over the course of a single round. Not only that, but if you play your class to its strengths it offers an immediately noticeable difference in how your team plays. Like the rest of the Battlefield series, your kill-death ratio is essentially secondary to how many points you can accumulate by aiding the rest of your team towards victory.

While [USA!]Scott Welch is so unstoppable he doesn’t actually need his team, things are made much easier when you work in tandem with your own squad and the squads around you. Like all fairly tactical games, things are always better when playing with, and against, a team of people who happen to own enough braincells to rub against each other. This can’t be more obvious when it comes to the bread and butter of the Battlefield series- vehicular combat. Competent use of the vehicles in large skirmishes can always be the defining factor between a loss and a win. This makes things incredibly tense, and also frustrating, when somebody who has no earthly idea what they are doing gets into a vehicle at an important time. [USA!]Scott Welch is looking at you on this one, 90% of the people who try to fly one of the helicopters.

Scott Welch reloads his rocket launcher casually, “Tanks for the memories” he mutters. “See, I said ‘tanks’ instead of ‘thanks’ because you are a tank, and I’m about to blow you up.”

The only real negative, other than when [USA!]Scott Welch gets done killing dozens of enemies only to get into a helicopter piloted by somebody who doesn’t know what they are doing and is piloted directly into the ocean, is that on the surface it may seem like [USA!]Scott Welch doesn’t have a whole lot of variety when it comes to locations to blow up or game modes to spill blood in. Bad Company 2 offers 8 maps (plus 2 extra through free DLC) plus four game types out of the box. The two most played modes are Conquest and Rush. In Conquest, the objective is to capture three command points in order to quickly deplete the enemies respawn tickets while Rush involves, depending on which side you are on, destroying or defending a pair of objectives. The other two game types are smaller squad-based affairs. Squad Deathmatch is, as the name might suggest, a more traditional deathmatch mode involving four squads competing against each other while Squad Rush is a multi-squad version of the aforementioned Rush mode.

This may not seem like a whole lot, but you hardly even notice when you are playing the same map twice in a row. [USA!]Scott Welch doesn’t at least, because he is too busy taking lives to notice whether he is spilling the blood of his enemies in snow or sand. Matches tend to play so differently, and the maps are so well designed, that cycling through the same eight doesn’t get tiring. Consider this to be the Left 4 Dead strategy. The gameplay mechanics themselves are so varied that the maps don’t necessarily need to be. To some, the maps and modes may seem minuscule, but they do a better job of complimenting the game then is regularly seen.

“Just another day at the office,” Scott Welch says, “except by the office, I mean another day spent killing people in their face. With bullets.”

Now, while I am mainly addressing the multiplayer components of the game, I don’t want to cheapen what turned out to be an incredibly engrossing singleplayer campaign. DICE has really crafted a great story with some of the most believable characters and dialog I’ve seen in a war shooter. As a pretentious douchebag writer, I understand how difficult it is to create an engaging character, and it seems to be even more difficult in the video game medium. This could be because we as gamers are just conditioned to expect a high level of action and low level of narrative which makes things difficult to relate to, or maybe because so many gaming characters are in such fantastical environments and situation there is no way to really become attached to them- unless the writing is way above average. It certainly is in Bad Company 2.

When you sit down and look at the amount of entertainment available in Bad Company 2, whether it be through the incredibly entertaining and energetic multiplayer or the well written and witty singleplayer, it is safe to say that if [USA!]Scott Welch had purchased any other tactical shooter, he would have wasted his money.

That doesn’t count as a comparison.