I knew extremely little of Bad Company when I started Battlefield: Bad Company 2 ( basically that it was a first person shooter) and thought that I got the idea right away. A return to World War II, no UI clutter, not even any ammo limit, cinematic without being slathered in sentimentality, soundtracked by sophisticated orchestral music aware of more possible lead instruments than strings. Here was a back to basics take on a genre which had gone well away from those roots, executed with polish. That all made sense. Then the game jumped forward in time, crosshairs and writing on a satellite map appeared, and it turned out all that was just the prologue to another take on Modern Warfare.
For the rest of the game many elements of Bad Company 2 feel all too familiar, from the missions all covered in snow to the grenade signals and aiming destinations for airstrikes, to the vehicular intervals which feel quite brazen in their pointlessness at points. It’s not quite a singularly derivative Saints Row situation, not least because Call of Duty: Modern Warfare didn’t actually pioneer that much compared to Grand Theft Auto 3, but Bad Company 2 is obvious in sliding itself into a popular moment. The ways it stands out are all more subtle, but do eventually show some of the same strengths as the prologue showed off.
It is very much another game of fast action set pieces, with an auto-aim a bit less generous than Modern Warfare’s which still makes it easy to rattle through target after target. It has its own stylised specialist missions too, like the sniper one where you have to time your shots to blend in with a thunderstorm. What happens next is instructive, though. You take your sniper rifle with you and can use it as one of several valid strategies in the next section as you attack a riverside camp. There are different routes, as there are in many places, and despite the squad fighting alongside you the illusion doesn’t tend to fall apart completely if you don’t go to the right place at the right time.
This freedom to react in your own way ties in with one of the game’s technical advances, which is an impressively complete range of destructible territory. Look out a small window to pick off your enemies and the wall might get blown up, leaving just a few scant bricks of protection. Smoke can completely block your view at times, too. So not only do you have more options, but you need to think a lot more consistently about what you are doing to make it work. It also all looks very impressive, not that surprising from the developers behind Mirror’s Edge, although don’t go expecting anything as stark or stylised.
The story is successfully back-to-basics in its own way, too Bad Company 2 puts you in charge of a small unit who are sent on some special missions, with a sergeant whose retirement has just been postponed for this purpose. Based on synopsis it seems to have de-emphasised comedy since the first Bad Company, but it has a fair bit of reasonably handled banter and, like, a hippy pacifist helicopter pilot who is there for the unit to swear at. At one point you get to your first ammo drop and a character meets the explanation with “I am familiar with how a crate works”, and the meta snark made me itch a little.
Where it does work is in the focus on a few people who are largely in the dark about what is going on, making their isolation and relative powerlessness the focus rather than the power and might of the US army. It reminded me at times of Conflict: Vietnam if it had a more enjoyable game attached. Bad Company 2 has a mission in the (Bolivian) jungle called ‘Heart of Darkness’ and got an expansion pack set in the Vietnam War, so its developers were probably thinking of similar things in their approach too. Though it is resolutely not set in the real world, and not quite in the Call of Duty sense of being set in a more paranoid fantasy of it. Its biggest back-to-basics move is a return to being military propaganda at a slightly abstract remove rather than being highly specific about it on the surface. That isn’t much to celebrate, but here we are.
Top of the charts for week ending 6 March 2010:
