Battlefield: Bad Company

Game Info

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Developer: Digital Illusions

Genre(s): First-Person Shooter

Players: 24

ESRB Rating: T (Teen)

Release Date: June 23, 2008

Summary

Built from the ground-up for next-generation consoles using Digital Illusions' Frostbite game engine, Battlefield: Bad Company drops gamers behind enemy lines with a squad of renegade soldiers who risk it all on a personal quest for gold and revenge. Featuring a deep, cinematic single-player experience loaded with adventure and dark humor, the game delivers the series' trademark sandbox gameplay in a universe where nearly everything is destructible. Battlefield: Bad Company also features a full suite of the franchise's trademark multiplayer options with deep gameplay modes designed to take full advantage of the game's massively destructible environments. [Electronic Arts]

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What The Critics Said

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What Our Users Said

Vote Now! The average user rating for this game is 7.9 (out of 10) based on 134 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Alex H gave it a3:
The single player is fun but gets repetitive. Achievements are stupid in that you will not get the achievement for beating a mission on normal if you played it on hard so you have to play through them twice to get them all. Multiplayer hit detection is awful and you will often be killed and not know how or from where. That doesn't make for a very fun experience and overall this game just doesn't cut it. Pass on this and get Call of Duty.

Mack gave it a10:
Bad Company has to be one of the best multiplayer experiences possible. The multiplayer has persistent stats and rankings that will keep you playing. Although, once you reach level 25, there's not much more incentive, besides your skill level. But every other time you level up, you earn 1 credit used to unlock new weapons/equipment. For each class there are 2 weapons to unlock, 1 equipment (such as a tracer gun, etc.), 1 special weapon per class (for doing different things like subscribing to the newsletter or registering another BF game), and 1 extra weapon per class that you unlock for reaching level 25. Oh, and did I mention you can blow S*** up? Enemy hiding behind a wall? No problem, blow that wall open and mow 'em down. Multiplayer: 10 There's not much to say about singleplayer but here goes. This is the first time that a BF game has actually had a good singleplayer(no more bot matches). And I have to say they did quite good. The story is interesting, there's funny dialogue(if sometimes annoying), and destructable enviroments. Singleplayer: 9.5.

Sasha gave it a9:
Great game that shouldn't be missed. first time i rented it i thought it sucked, but when i played it at my friends house later, i gave it another try and loved it. CoD 4 got boring and WaW sucked @$$ cheese so i played this all the F**king time! yay! buy it

Ron H gave it a4:
Overall this game is a huge disappointment and step down from Battlefield 2. Even though I bought it new for 15 bucks, I feel a little ripped off. First off, the single player campaign is quite terrible, for a couple of reasons. The missions quickly become very repetitive and the levels are boring and uninspired. There is not a single urban/city level, all of the levels take place outdoors in open fields/sparse forests. This is also something I dislike about the multiplayer maps, the lack of true variety. The music, what little there is, is not up to the standard of Battlefield 2. The story and characters are ok, nothing too special, I have no complaints there. I don't expect anything too original from the stories of FPS games. The graphics are allright, nothing to complain about there, especially since the environments have a lot of destructible objects. The enemy AI is a huge letdown, as well as a cause of great frustration. I found this by far the biggest factor that ruined much of the potential fun of the single player campaign. This is one area where the single player campaign of Call of Duty 4 did a MUCH better job. The enemy seems to have perfect aim and can see through objects, effectively rendering any stealth based approach futile. If it weren't for the fact that any enemies you kill before dying stay dead when you respawn, the campaign would be pretty much unplayable from the get-go. Literally the second you are in a position where the enemies bullets can hit you, they will hit you, with near perfect accuracy every time. One great aspect of the single player campaign is the destructible environments, which is also the best feature of the multiplayer. The vehicles are ok, nothing special, and there isn't nearly as much variety as in Battlefield 2 (both in single player and multiplayer). The controls in the game are allright, they feel a little clunky at first, but I feel they are pretty good after getting used to them. The multiplayer is not much better than the single player, and personally I find it a huge disappointment. To me, the biggest problem is the lack of clan support, private rooms, and just in general the way you join games. You pretty much get placed randomly into a game, it might be the map you chose to play, it might not. But the quality of the game you get thrown into varies greatly due to many different factors. In short, the multiplayer could be so much better than it is, had the developers just implemented a better system for joining games, and fixed the severe issues that plague the gameplay. The multiplayer uses a squad system, where you are paired with 3 other team mates. You can only communicate with them, the rest of your team (the other squads) just go about doing whatever it is they're doing since you have no way of communicating together. This makes the gameplay chaotic and destroys any real sense of teamwork in most matches. In most matches there is a kind of "every man for himself" feeling, even though the gold rush mode (the main multiplayer mode) is supposed to be a team-based objective game. This can get annoying when people are just chasing after kills, rather than defending/attacking the objective. In many rounds on the gold rush mode, and for that matter the conquest as well (which has to be downloaded), people just play like it is a death match and try to get a good kill/death ratio. Sometimes if you invite friends to be in your squad, they still end up in another squad, or even on the other team! This is the least of the problems though. The online is chock-full of glitches and exploits which so many people use that it makes a lot of matches (if not most of them) far more frustrating than fun. For example there is an artillery glitch that allows people to keep firing an incredibly powerful artillery gun at the enemy base without the recharge period the developers intended it to have. But that raises the question if they intended the recharge period to be there why haven't they STILL fixed it? Knifing is completely broken, which is incredibly frustrating. To me this is one of the biggest flaws with the game. Often times it doesn't register when you try to do it, other times you get knifed from literally 20 feet away, and vice versa. It seems completely random as to what will happen when you or your enemy pulls out the knife. Sometimes when you plant C4 on a vehicle, even though you clearly see it got placed where it should, you get mysteriously blown up only to find that the C4 didn't get stuck to the vehicle after all, even though it clearly did. This is another glitch the developers STILL haven't fixed, although this is far less frustrating than the issues with the knife. Another huge issue with the multiplayer is that the weapons are completely imbalanced. Because of this many people will just spam the overpowered weapons, making the game less fun than it should be. The problem is that many guns are very weak and inaccurate, but a few are incredibly powerful and precise. The MP5, for example, is too powerful for what it is, and yet its the starting weapon for the specialist class. Its pretty much as powerful as an M16, and almost as accurate. One of the shotguns which can be unlocked, the NS2000, is by far the most powerful weapon in the game. It can kill in one shot from sometimes over 30 feet away, and you barely have to aim it, just point it in the general direction. Granted anyone can use it to get cheap kills after unlocking it, it simply isn't fun playing a game where people are camping with it near the gold crates/outposts. The other shotguns are completely underpowered by comparison, apart from the MCS, which is also a little overpowered, although nowhere near as ridiculously accurate as the NS2000. The support class machineguns are almost useless at close range, since they take what seems like 50-100 bullets to kill anyone, and maybe 10 shots to the head. The sniper rifles are ok, that and the assault weapons are the only weapons classes that are adequately balanced. Some of the maps are better designed than others. There is one map which is just ridiculously annoying to play, almost every time, if you are on the attacking side. I think its called Deconstruction. There are a few small spots you have to go through to get to the enemy base, which makes it way too easy for the enemy to just camp in their base and kill you over and over again. Often times in this map the round will end without a single crate having been destroyed. A lot of the other maps are better thought but there are a couple of other slightly frustrating ones. Other issues with the multiplayer include team killers/spawn campers. Unlike in past Battlefield titles, it seems no consideration went toward either of these issues. Some rounds are rife with people that have memorized spawn points, who just sit in their enemies base and knife/blow up/gun down people as they appear, before they can do anything. There is no penalty for doing this. Similarly sometimes people deliberately start team killing, and although this decreases their amount of points in the round, there is no real punishment/penalty for it either which is why it happens far more than it should. Basically you can do anything you want in a round and you won't get kicked out no matter what. If the developers thought the multiplayer could function on some sort of unspoken honor system, they were wrong. Another big problem with the multiplayer is that there seems to be no balancing system in place for the teams. Almost every round online consists of a hugely powerful team fighting against a far less powerful team. Often the more powerful team will even have more players than the weaker team, because people on the weaker team just leave the game after being frustrated, and understandably so. 99% of the time you will feel like your team is either completely owning/being owned. It is obvious there is no balancing going on. Some sort of balancing system, at least in between rounds, would really have made the multiplayer more enjoyable. A small, but nonetheless notable issue with the multiplayer is the helicopter controls. It takes a little getting used to, because for some reason they are completely different than in the single player, even though the helicopters are the same. But whats worse is that the manual doesn't mention this, in fact nowhere in the game does it mention the multiplayer helicopter controls. Because of this, people are left to figure it out for themselves through trial and error. Often times inexperienced players will rush to the helicopter, only to end up crashing it a few seconds later, much to the frustration of others, while wondering why the controls didn't do what they thought they should do. Another complaint I have about the multiplayer is regarding the maps in conquest mode. The maps are simply too small and poorly implemented for it. It feels nothing like the conquest mode of previous Battlefield titles. The one great thing about the multiplayer, as mentioned earlier, is the destructible environments. This aspect of the game works very well with only a few minor issues. Buildings and bridges, for example, cannot be completely destroyed. Nonetheless the destructible environments are one of the most fun and well implemented features of both the multiplayer and single player. It is very rewarding to see an enemy/enemies camping behind a wall, and to then blow up the wall and kill the enemy. The C4 also works quite well on buildings and ground, apart from the horrendous vehicle glitch mentioned earlier. Despite the flaws of the multiplayer there is still definitely some fun to be had. Its just that theres so much frustration getting in the way of it. Occasionally you find a good, balanced game, just through sheer luck, where the players aren't glitching/abusing exploits to win. Sometimes you even get a good squad where you all work together to defend/attack the objective or capture bases. The problem is, that often you will have to join about 15 games before you find a truly enjoyable one that isn't populated by people lag-knifing, spawn camping, artillery glitching, team killing, overusing the NS2000, etc. Although many of the flaws of the multiplayer can be blamed on the people who play the game (and choose to glitch/spawn camp/use unfair methods to win), the developers should really have put more effort into fixing the various iissues and balancing the game out, to prevent such flagrant abuses in the first place. I could understand somewhat if the flaws were there upon release, but the fact that they still havent been fixed a year after release is unforgivable. For this reason I am not going to buy Bad Company 2 or Battlefield 1943, unless I can see for sure that all these problems are fixed, especially the issues with the knife.

Dustin R gave it a6:
The single player campaign was great. Multi-player is full of glitches/bugs that have yet to be addressed. These bugs can be of great annoyance to the honest gamer. The players that use these glitches to downright murder the opposing team ruin the multiplayer aspect.

Johnny G gave it a10:
People whining about realism obviously haven't played a Battlefield game before. And what's the deal with you realism freaks anyway, REALISM PLAYS WORSE gameplay wise. Proning would not contribute anything extra to this game as it would only benefit the campers/snipers. This game plays like a dream online, I'd say it's a lot better than COD4s constant grenade spamming. COD4 is for people who like to shoot people in the back, as you're constantly spawned behind the enemy. BF:BC is for people who enjoy good gameplay and team tactics.

Johnny G gave it a10:
People whining about realism obviously haven't played a Battlefield game before. And what's the deal with you realism freaks anyway, REALISM PLAYS WORSE gameplay wise. Proning would not contribute anything extra to this game as it would only benefit the campers/snipers. This game plays like a dream online, I'd say it's a lot better than COD4s constant grenade spamming. COD4 is for people who like to shoot people in the back, as you're constantly spawned behind the enemy. BF:BC is for people who enjoy good gameplay and team tactics.

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