May 6, 2010

I think we got some Russians commin’!

This is a review of Battlefield: The Worst Companionship.

Since I bought the PC version of 2 on a whim, I thought I would give the single player a go in the first edition before I went on. You know, for plot relevance, and so on. It arrived from Gamefly, and I played through it. Then I returned it.

First off, it’s clear that DICE needed to get some mistakes out of their system. The controls in Battlefield: Bad Company leave something to be desired. It should really be using the d-pad to select secondary weapons, but instead, it uses some weird-ass ineffective system with the bumpers. I know they fixed this in the second one, because they had it fixed in the demo, which is good. There’s no excuse for that being that way.
The campaign, too, has some missteps. First off, it gives you no achievements for playing on easy, which I hate. Secondly, the checkpoints just aren’t intelligent when you’re looking at a huge area of combat like this game does. You’ll checkpoint somewhere, drive far away, die, and then respawn at the checkpoint, where you already took the vehicle, so you have to walk all the way back to where you died, only to, perhaps, die again, and have to walk all the way back there again. Seriously, it was this sort of stuff that was the majority of the game time, and it really frustrated. They could have at least spawned a little four-wheeler or something for me when I die like that.

The one mechanic I really liked was the syringe. Most games either have health packs, or belong to the “heavy breathing” school of shooter design, where if you are out of fire long enough, you heal. Bad Company splits the difference with this magical recharging syringe. Using it heals you to full, and it recharges to use again very quickly and has no ammo. At the same time, you have to pay attention and switch to it to heal yourself, and do so in enough time for the animation to go off, if you’re in the middle of a firefight. I felt like this was a great compromise between health packs and regenning health. It’s friendly, and low stress, but you still have to think about healing and heal management. “I have time to heal now, so I could heal now, but I’m not hurt much, and if that tank hits me while I’m running across the field I’ll need to heal then, and it won’t have recharged yet. It’s one of the best parts of the game.

Additionally, I saw what the Giant Bomb guys saw in the game. The characters are excellent, and very entertaining to listen to. One wishes they would have even more banter than they do during combat, instead of keeping it mostly between fights. I mean, sure, they’re in serious combat scenarios, they don’t need to be funny then, but more excuses for them to play off each other would have been welcome. I think they nailed the tone and characterization perfectly. I heard it changed a bit in the second game, and that does worry me, but we’ll see when I get to playing the single player of that one.

The multiplayer is similar to the single player. You see where they came from, but after having played the multiplayer in the second game, it’s just ridiculous how much better that is. You have no reason to play original Bad Company multiplayer, except maybe for the achievements. I played a round just for that, and then put it down.

Still, if you’re more hardcore than me and won’t die so much, Bad Company single player is worth a play through. It’s often funny, and has some interesting combat scenarios. It’s all you can really ask for.

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