KylieDog

User Score
8.5

Presentation - 9.0
Gameplay - 8.0
Value - 9.0

I’ll briefly mention the single player campaign since this has never been the attraction of the BF series, in fact until the first Bad Company game a campaign had failed to exist in the series.  It is a rather short lasting 5-8 hours depending on difficulty settings and player skills.  Nothing really remarkable that hasn’t been done before, the maps are very straight and narrow and lack the open freedom the first games campaign presented.  This helps keep the campaign action packed a majority of the time but it’s a step away from what Battlefield is.  The humour of the first game is still present but to find the best bits you’ll need stop during the campaign and listen to chatter between squad mates, the overall story takes a much more serious tone than the first games hunt for gold bars, this time dealing with a race between the US and Russia for a secret weapon lost since World War II.

Now onto the multiplayer, this is where Battlefield reigns supreme, stepping up the game from the first Bad Company there is now the ability to completely level a building into a pile a rubble, destruction is no longer limited to just outside walls, micro destruction has also been added allowing just small holes to be chipped out of walls for a make-shift hole to shoot from.  The way these things enhance the gameplay is hard to describe, all sorts of new depths are added.

Other new things added since the first game include swapping the health system for a regenerating one and adding specialisations to enhance your character or weapons.   The regenerating health system unlike other games that feature this is a lot slower to regenerate and is better to seek a medic for best healing.  

The specialisations are hit and miss if they are an improvement on gameplay.  Improvements including specs such as the ability to carry extra ammo, extra rockets or mines, faster sprinting speed or aiming speed when exiting a sprint.  On the border between improvement or not is the fact that almost all guns in BC2 have the ability to have scopes attached to them as a spec, the ranges vary but some allow for sniping on guns that really shouldn’t be able to snipe, it takes away from different classes benefits somewhat and limits ways for you to move around maps when you can be killed from far away easily from most classes/guns.   Some specs that completely ruin gameplay include Magnum Ammo and Body Armour, these two specialisations are complete rip-offs of Stopping Power and Juggernaut perks from Call of Duty games.  It seems odd they are added to Battlefield when they stick out from the Battlefield style so much and are often complained about heavily in the game the were stolen from in the first place.

A large fault in BC2s design are the maps, this is personal opinion but too many maps in the multiplayer are too narrow, Battlefield maps in past games were very open and allowed objectives to be attacked from a multiple of ways, BC2 maps being so linear and narrow often leave little freedom.  In the Conquest mode there is also a large lack of bases to capture.  Battlefield 1943 proved that the lower 24 player count on large maps with a larger amount of bases randomly placed on maps can work fine so why most BC2 maps only have 3 base and are placed in a straight line is curious, it removes a lot of freedom the player used to have.  There is also a very limited amount of maps and maps are recycled too much between game modes.

Other problems are ones that remain from the first Bad Company game and are problems created with the series moving from PC to consoles.  On PC each teams main base was almost always declared to be off limits to the other team, nobody likes base/spawn campers and it would cause game servers to empty if that were allowed to happen, PC servers have admins to enforce the anti-base camping rules but console servers have no such luxury.  In Battlefield 1943 DICE seemed to realise this and removed points for any base kills, in BC2 though DICE did not keep this feature and as a result on some maps the game ends up one team just spawn killing the other team in their home base.  DICEs statement on this is to “Quit game and find another server” which is pretty damn appalling considering they knew it was a major issue and failed to keep what they implemented in BF 1943, as a result too many games end up with 12 players against a significantly lower number, a problem not helped at all since DICE also removed the team auto-balance feature the PC has.

Bad Company 2 is probably the most unique shooter out there thanks to its vehicles and destruction and arguably the best consoles have to offer, however some design decisions really hurt it and they are mostly things that were removed from past games and that have no real reason they shouldn’t be present in this one too, this stops the game from being truly great even if the game is still not to be missed.