Impressions - Battle Field: Bad Company

Over the last week I have been playing Battlefield: Bad Company (Xbox 306), and I have to say... I loved it. From weapon selection and variation to the interactive environment and the number of gadgets you get to use during the course of the game it was fantastic. The story line; four outcasts banding together to hunt down Mercenary Gold was very Three Kings like.

What I liked about BF:BC
  • I found the NPCs to be great, the witty comments and remarks made during the course of the game are well written, and the voice acting and cut scenes are top notch.
  • The boards are huge and full of great places to hide, for both the player and the Computer AI - this resulted in many deaths however.
  • The scenery and explosive probabilities of the environment are virtually endless. You can really blow up almost everything on the map.
  • The online multi-player systems was also fantastic, Massive maps to play with tons of different equipment to use (Tanks, Helicopters, and Artillery) .
  • Players are quick to respawn in the case of death, and equipment upgrades (earned by gaining rank) and items are easily managed via the game selection screens.
Now for what I didn't like:
  • NPCs were sometime a little useless - hiding behind buildings of objects and avoiding the gun fight leaving the entire battle up to you.
  • Achievements are not stackable; meaning if you play on Hard you also need to play on Easy to unlock all of the achievements... If you care about achievements that is.

  • Multi-player seamed kind of random for team selection and I didn't really see a noticeable "Party up" option for playing with friends. Note: It is there somewhere, but during the matches I played I didn't see it.
  • The number of maps felt a bit limited; It seemed I was always playing the same three or four maps over and over, and that the variation was mostly determined by your current objective (offence - blow up the gold crates, or defence - protect the crates) and where your "base" was located on each map.
All in all a very fun game, worth buying and spending the time on. Maybe EA will release a patch that fixes the achievement stacking, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it. For now I'll settle on taking the easy way to get collect these.

I haven't finished BF:BC yet, but plan on doing so in the not so distant future, right after I get over playing the newly release Civilization Revolution that I picked up last night.