It’s nice that we’ve got the introductions over with, because now I can really let rip on a game I’ve wanted to talk about for quite a while; Battlefield: Bad Company. I hear some faint murmurings at the back there, what was that? Why am I reviewing a game from last year and not a new one? I think we should cover that point first.

I’m a student and therefore spend all my money on nice things to eat whilst lying down on comfortable things which I bought with taxpayer’s money.  Well, I don’t actually. I shall review Dante’s Inferno soon enough (after I’ve completed a bit more of it!) and we’ll see if I can really do this game reviewing business. Until then, however, we’re stuck with me and my backwards-looking, eagle-eyed hindsight.

This game has quite a lot going for it at first glance: It’s quite pretty, the levels are reasonably well designed, the controls are intuitive and fun, and it has one of the best online multiplayer services I’ve ever experienced. For those of you chomping at the bit to shout at me about that rather garrulous claim, please calm down, all will be explained in due course. Like most modern FPS’s you play a character with a name so boring you won’t remember it, who is sent to work for “Bad Company”, a company where all the naughty children go who can’t play nice. You spend a good proportion of the game listening to your witless “friends” babble about how they’re so amazing because they have to do this all on their own, and the other half calling in air strikes and waiting for supply drops whilst being spoon-fed your next objective by a rather stern sounding woman whose voice makes me cross my legs slightly.

As I have outlined before me and graphics don’t always see eye to eye, but there’s something to be said for the graphics in Battlefield: Bad Company that might seem slightly contradictory. Firstly, one of the major problems with shoot ‘em ups (when was the last time you heard that term?) is that you want to be able to see your enemy so that you can shoot at them, yet also you want to be hidden enough for them not to be able to shoot at you. You can already see the clusterfuck this creates. Originally shooters were quite well-balanced in that you were a red blob, your enemy was a blue blob and everything else was either grey (castle/city/public toilet/office), green (jungle/woods/Travis Perkins), brown (desert/mud huts/Australia/Mexico/Pyramids) or a combination of all 3 (Amazonian Temple/Hull/English Countryside) and very occasionally the surroundings would be blue for underwater (meaning the blue team were either invisible or had now become yellow) or white for a collection of giant’s cum-rags. Then as graphics became more and more advanced it transpired that people wanted it to be more realistic, so everything became brown/grey/green/Hull/white and no one could see who or where the fuck anybody was. Battlefield: Bad Company however manages to present a wide enough pallet of colours and rich enough textures so that you can see if you’re shooting at a foe, a friend or in fact a camouflaged portaloo.

Whilst we’re discussing scenery I’d like to discuss Battlefield: Bad Company’s main selling point: Destruct-o-scenery. Whilst a lot of games have managed some sort of destruct-o-scenery, Battlefield: Bad Company does it the best. Some scenery is destructible, some is not, although this seems a little like cheating it means that you can’t just blow the shit out of a bridge and sit back with mortars whilst your enemy advance, but it also means you can grenade the fuck out of a roof of a house then happily mow down everyone inside (which is very satisfying). The best way to describe why this is the selling point of the game is because at no point do you curse the fact it’s there. It’s not broken, if you hang around after a wall blows up that shit’s on you, it also means you develop a sense of “move and fire” and also you never get games where Mr.Kill_Snipe (as they’re always called in some sort of variation) sprints for indomitable cover and spends the whole game laughing his face off as he snipes your pretty little faces and calls missiles down on tanks. It brings the fun back to it. I suppose balance is fairly prevalent throughout the whole game actually; tanks aren’t indomitable (like fucking Call of Duty), helicopters aren’t flying rape and no class is overwhelmingly better than the others.

The controls are especially easy to get to grips with; Right trigger is for shooting things… um… that’s about it really. You’ve got a switch weapon button, a reload button, sprint and Close Quarters Instant Click of Death (pressing the right analogue stick) and also a delightful innovative little tactic whereby you cycle through items with the Left Bumper then press B to use. This saves so much time over an inventory screen and shows how well thought out the controls actually are. If I really wanted to showcase the point I’d point out that pressing the Right Bumper automatically switches to the secondary weapon on your gun so you can fir grenades then to switch back is the same button. Simple, effective, elegant and totally intuitive.

You may have noticed something about this review; I’ve written 850 words and not once brought up the story or the actual gameplay. Yeah… there’s a reason for that. Battlefield: Bad Company’s main problem can be summarised horribly easily and I don’t really want to do it because it’s so much fun to play. The single player is boring, indelibly dull, overwhelmingly numbing and repetitive. Foxy base-lady tells you to go somewhere, you go there (and you will, or no snoo-snoo for you), complete an objective then get told where to go next. I don’t actually know anyone who’s completed the story mode. We’ve just arsed about on multiplayer killing each other and laughing as buildings and people explode. It’s a lot of money for what it is, when what it is, isn’t very much.

In summary then, the game is well executed, beautiful, balanced, intuitive, innovative and great fun… as long as you play against mates and NEVER look at the campaign. EVER. Which is a lot of money for a multiplayer… shame really.