More-den Warfare
When it comes to the FPS genre, the war department is a crowded one indeed. With Modern Warfare 2 ruling the roost, Operation Flashpoint providing the hardcore alternative, and the likes of Medal of Honor and Treyarch's Call of Duty title still to come later this year, it takes a big and brave name to step into the line of fire. Enter the Battlefield series.
Originally making its name as an online WW2 shooter, Battlefield stepped into the present day with Battlefield 2: Modern Combat in 2005, before returning to that era in a big way with the original Bad Company game in 2008. The latter mixed the popular online modes with a full squad-based campaign mode, and the same is true of EA and DICE's sequel.
The campaign begins with a prologue set in 1944, as you undertake Operation Aurora. The ramifications of this mission then form part of the main, modern day storyline that you enter into afterwards. Once again, the four trouble-makers brought together are sent back to work, with the Sarge having to postpone his retirement that little bit longer.
Comparisons with Modern Warfare are inevitable, especially through the various desert and snow-covered landscapes, although the Bad Company do like to take a few nice jabs at their competition, with various insults thrown at the sort of folks who use guns with heartbeat sensors and drive snowmobiles. One thing that stands this game apart from the rivals though is its damage model, with the ability to smash down doors, blow out walls, or even collapse a whole building with your explosives or a well-placed shot into a gas tank.
For the most part, the campaign itself is incredibly linear, with the majority of missions following the A-C via a big shoot-out at B format. Only one mission provides an exception to this rule, offering something of a free-roaming element when it provides you with three locations to investigate in the order of your choosing. However, this is a sadly underutilised feature. There is mild encouragement to investigate every corner of every building in order to find Satellite Uplinks stations to blow up, and unlockable weapons to add to your collection, but for the most part it's pretty formulaic.
It's not an overly long campaign either, though chances are your play-through will be increased by several irritating deaths from the set-piece battles. Getting picked off through a wall by a rapid fire weapon while yours slowly reloads can lead to an increasingly frustrating series of restarts. Meanwhile, the game's final mission, set on-board an aircraft (a reference to MW's Mile High Club, perhaps) is surprisingly short and even relatively simple on the hardest difficulty setting - odd, when you consider that it's the only Hard difficulty mission that carries its own achievement/trophy.
