Battlefield Bad Company IGN Video Review

I know what you are thinking. "Chronic, if I wanted to watch the IGN video review of BF: BC I would just saunter over to IGN.com and check it out. Post some original content you lazy bastard!" Well, its true, the blog has been a little bit slim on original content this month. Id like to able to sit down everyday and write something interesting, but it doesnt always work out. Often, Im too lazy or busy. Othertimes, I write something but it turns out to be a giant steaming pile of buffalo excrement. And I only post half of those. Anyway, my feeling is I would rather have people stop by everyday expecting new content, and if they get mechjacked by some copy and paste well at least hopefully it was somewhat relevent or interesting or entertaining. Oh and one last thing: leave comments you bastards! Otherwise I feel like I am writing into a deep black void.....

Now, my thoughts on the Battlefield: Bad Company demo seem to be pretty much confirmed by the IGN review of the full game. After trying and failing twice, once on the original Xbox and once on the 360, D.I.C.E. has finally managed to bring the Battlefield 2 experience to the home consoles for the most part intact and in many ways better than ever. Battlefield 2 is one of my favorite online game ever, when it came out in 2005 I was fully sucked into the rankings system and played online 30 hours a week plus. The main problems with that game were the lack of a friends list, and the lack of a favorite servers list, so it was really difficult to both find a stable, non-laggy match and then almost impossible to get all your friends into the server and onto the same team and then into the same squad. Now, here is where the main differences between BF:2 and BF:BC rear their ugly heads.

Battlefield 2 is a squad based tactical shooter - when you enter a match, get assigned to a team you then have the option of joining a squad or being a lone wolf. The only way to take control points quickly in BF:2 is to have a full squad, with a medic, sniper, assault, support, anti-tank, and engineer units all working together as one super-unit, under the control of the Commander, the one person on each team that directs the attacks and has a full battlefield map with radar and artillery options.

Battlefield: Bad Company has none of that. So, I cant really say its the true Battlefield experience. But its still damn fun online and the fact that it has dedicated 24 person servers that run over Xbox Live makes it by far the most user friendly and accessible BF game ever made. Also, its the best looking BF game yet made. The Frostbite Engine looks fantastic - a full generational step beyond BF:2 on the PC - and the environments are almost completely destructable. The game runs quite well on the 360 with no slowdown or screen tearing and is presented in beautiful full widescreen (BF:2 only supports standard 4x3 resolutions - yuck!). Also, there is voice chat, which BF:2 did not support. This makes the game way more fun to play with your friends as you can hear them cheer when they blow up a tank and then squeal in pain as they die in a hail of helicopter machine gun fire. The lack of a squad system makes the game less tactical and more chaotic, which isnt ideal, but the chaos is somewhat allieviated by the insanely destructable environments and user friendly XBL interface.

If I had to describe the experience in a few words to someone who was only familiar with console games, I would say Battlefield Bad Company feels a bit like Call of Duty 4 crossed with Halo. Im just talking about the multiplayer here - apparently BF:BC will actually feature a single player campaign which is a first for the BF games. So, if you like vehicular combat mixed in with destructable environments and modern military weapons, I think BF:BC certainly deserves a close look. The gameplay isnt quite as polished as something like Halo or Cod4, but it doesnt have to be for the game to still be a lot of fun.