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Battlefield: Bad Company (PS3/XBOX 360) By: Adam Waddilove This company is bad-ass! Built from the ground-up for next-generation consoles using Digital Illusions' bleeding-edge 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 Battlefield experience loaded with adventure and dark humour, Battlefield: Bad Company delivers the Battlefield's' trademark sandbox gameplay in a universe where nearly everything is destructible. It’s truly remarkable how a game series can completely change its traditional design to a more modern one. Bad Company is the first Battlefield game to do so, sure it maintains a lot of the series’ strongholds, but a lot has changed, for the better. The story mode offers a lot more than just a simple “There’s a war” script, instead it adds comedy and a real sense of purpose. Bad Company themselves a bunch of convicts who are serving in the Company to reduce their jail time. You play as the newest member of the team and it’s not long before the Company find themselves in hot water. The game starts out with you going across a map, taking out enemies and blowing up objects, but you’ll come across a gold bar after the first level and then the hunt begins to get rich. Of course, things are never that simple, especially since it’s a bunch of super-mercenaries who are hoarding all the gold. In previous Battlefield games, you’d usually pick a class to be for the level. Be it a sniper, demolition expert, soldier and so on. Bad Company takes away all that and lets you do it all, providing you can find the weapons to do so. It handles more like a traditional FPS now and it’s definitely a much needed improvement for the series. Environments are incredibly destructible; the physics engine is truly amazing here. It’s a shame that some of the simpler objects won’t let themselves be destroyed, but there are a good 95% of things to blow up in each level. The mission objectives in the game are usually quite straightforward. Usually a case of go to the spot on the map, kill the enemies or destroy something like a transmitter tower or machine gun nests. Bad Company gives you a great advantage by letting you constantly heal yourself back to 100% thanks to an injection that reloads every few seconds. On top of that, you’ll constantly respawn if you die and your teammates appear to be immortal. So chances of failing missions are low, unless it’s an escort objective. It’s an odd choice for them to make, considering the new overall feel of the game but at least it makes it more accessible to everyone, which can only be a good thing. Weapons themselves pack quite a punch, there’s a huge arsenal here. Some weapons are hidden across the level and collectibles, which will help you towards some achievements in the 360 version, as with hunting gold bars. Although the accuracy of the weapons is a little off, so they won’t feel nearly as strong as you would imagine. You’ll also come across sections where you are badly mismatched, be it against a helicopter or a tank while on foot, that means trouble. But a good RPG will blow them up, although the choppers are much harder to hit.    Enemies are clever enough, although some can be quite stupid at times. Some won’t even acknowledge you because of a glitch, but that rarely happens. The comedy moments of Bad Company are brilliant but I’m sure it won’t be to everyone’s taste. It really depends on what kind of humour you personally like, but if you can grasp that of BC, you’ll have a good time. The characters of the Company are memorable for their own reasons and you will definitely like them, for the most part. At launch there’s only one online mode, which does the job in providing the typical Battlefield feel. Conquest mode will have to wait as downloadable content in the future, making the online package a tad disappointing, even if the one mode in there is probably more fun than the campaign itself. You might be disappointed that you may have to pay extra for Conquest, but the current mode is a worthy addition to what is a good overall package. Graphically, Bad Company looks damn impressive. The explosions being excellent to look at, there’s something refreshing about launching a grenade at a building to see it make a big hole in it. The environments’ are also superbly detailed and highly destructible! Character models are also nicely well done, it would have been nice to have a more cinematic feel to the cutscenes instead of being stuck around the Company just chatting away in FPS view, but that’s only a small criticism. There isn’t much of a difference between the PS3 and 360 versions in terms of performance, so each machine gets a fair deal. The game has a nice soundtrack to it, sure you won’t be humming the tunes at work but it definitely fits the overall feel of the game. Voice-acting is great, depending on if you like the game’s humour or not. If you do, you’ll find a great script here and it’s acted out impressively. The Verdict Battlefield: Bad Company is a great step forward for the franchise; it changes its formula to make it a more enjoyable experience, which is commendable. There may be issues during the campaign and the lack of Conquest at launch, but if you can look past all that then you’ll find yourself a great FPS with a superb online mode. Plus, did I mention you can blow up almost everything? 
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