Battlefield: Bad Company Review, Continued

Along with an impressive armory of weapons, DICE included the unparalleled ability to destroy 90 percent of the environment. What this means is that you can load up the grenade launcher and blast your way through walls, gates and whatever else stands in your way. Who needs a door when blowing a hole in the wall is more entertaining? If taking the main road proves to be suicidal to the current objective, making your own route through buildings is not only safer, but is also insanely gratifying.

With the right tools, you can reduce an entire town into a smoldering heap of charred rubble, with its base structures standing amid the smoke like vaporous skeletons. Tanks, jeeps, helicopters and other vehicles share the same explosive demise. Missiles raining down from above will leave huge craters in the ground. There is essentially nowhere to hide in Bad Company, nor is there a safe haven or refuge that cannot be destroyed. Whether you're playing online or offline in the single-player campaign, the destructive environment is both a handy tool and a strategic weakness.

To compliment this awesome feature, DICE implemented huge maps that almost feel open-ended in nature. During the single-player campaign, the side objective is to collect gold bars and collectable weapons, thus provoking the gamer to slip into the protagonist's materialistic nature and hunt down the coveted treasures. The overall size of the environments is quite impressive given that they're not open-ended, offering seemingly miles of virtual terrain to cross either by vehicle or on foot. Gamers will find themselves straying from the current mission just to explore the surrounding area, investigating small shacks way off the trail, bushes or abandoned houses. The terrain size is just as impressive online, offering up massive, open fields, rolling, forest-ridden hills and a viewing distance that should make the console's graphics processor plead for mercy.

Bad Company comes with a single player campaign but the real draw is the game's multiplayer mode.

Thankfully, the game's Frostbite engine offers up some rather meaty frame rates, remaining deliciously fluid and stable throughout both Bad Company game modes. Unfortunately, there are some graphical issues that make the game look less-than-perfect visually. The flaws were also not apparent when playing the pre-release beta in SD mode. The most prominent flaw is the placement of shadows on character models, which dance around faces and body parts like dark, jiggly worms. There is also a gritty look overall in darker areas, which looks like what you see when you stand out in the sun for an extremely long duration of time and then experience the tiny haze of spots once you step inside, or when there is an underlying layer of snow because the analog TV antennae isn't getting a perfect reception. Foliage also looked less-than-spectacular up close, appearing as a mesh of greens and browns at times, or donning low textures and jagged edges.

Outside those few glitches, Bad Company is an amazing game visually. The Frostbite engine does an excellent job pulling you into its virtual war-torn world, conveying beautiful water effects, lush landscapes and believably dry deserts. What really stands out, however, are the environmental effects, adding tremendous volume and a genuinely realistic feel. A great example is the first objective in Par for the Course: you endure a nice cut-scene, another staged in-game conversation and then head up to a tree-covered vista point to regroup at a smoking flare. Once you reach the cliff, a huge, breath-taking panorama opens up with a semi-orange sun set low to the north, casting a wonderful blanket of hues across a wide valley. The air is thick; trees waver to a gentle breeze. The river at the foot of the hills sparkles with realistic reflections, hinting vaguely of a low, placid current. You can see a bridge in the distance, and just before that, a small complex.

Naturally, the pre-rendered cut scenes look excellent and add character to the B-Company, but the vast scenery offered in Bad Company leaves you in awe knowing that the bridge and the complex aren't just for looks; they're places you'll soon visit shortly. Unfortunately, progression is paced; the game does not allow you to go where you please on a large scale. Wander into restricted areas and you'll end up dead and back at the spawn point if you don't head back into safe territory under five seconds. Needless to say, you can't roll down the hill and barge into the complex until the game actually lifts the temporary borders.

As for Bad Company's single-player campaign, its seven chapters are definitely a blast to play. Taking place in the not-too-distant future, the conflict centers on a fictional war between the United States and the Russian Federation. You take on the role of Private Preston Marlowe as he joins two other unruly soldiers in the B-Company squad: comic relief Private George Gordon Haggard Jr. and the analytical Private Terrance Sweetwater. The ragtag group completes itself with the inclusion of Sergeant Samuel D Redford; he signed on to lead the group with the promise that his tour would end early if he accepted the assignment. He knows that these guys are at the bottom of the pole and that their recklessness could get him killed. Although the group follows orders in the beginning, things go astray when Sweetwater stumbles across a dead mercenary. This is where the group's insubordinate nature kicks in, and Redford's reluctance to follow along begins.

Interestingly enough, if Marlowe is killed in action, he's re-spawned at the last saved checkpoint. Because of the wonky controller sensitivity, you may think this a repetitive issue. What didn't make sense was that upon re-spawning, the immediate area remains unchanged. A perfect example is when you drive along in a tank and the enemy sends an explosive rocket up your tailpipe (if there is one). When your character respawns, not only does the mission not restart, but you thus have to run back to the point where your tank exploded, and that may take some time.

In one sense, you don't lose any of progress previously made, but on the other hand, there's no real penalty for death. Surprisingly, there are actual missions that do not follow this spawn point standard, throwing more confusion into the mix. It would have felt more consistent had DICE stuck to one type of gameplay mode rather than mixing up the two styles. However, these one-run missions are few and far in between.

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