After a LOT of play with the demo of Bad Company I found that I love the game…. and yet hate the game too.
With a game as ground breaking as Bad Company is there is always a worry that the game will not live up to the hype. I was really looking forward to Frontlines: Fuel of War at one time but then the demo’s were released and I found the game engine itself was laggy, the maps were very “muddy” and it was hard to see the enemies. Also TK’ing was rife on the demo servers which didn’t help much.
Back to Bad Company and destructible buildings with online gaming sounds great but won’t it be really laggy? Will the single player game be up to much? Will it be as much fun to play as the hype says? Well let’s see then shall we?
Single Player Campaign
The single player campaign sample in the demo is a short mission (well they don’t want to give the game away for free after all) but it shows how much fun it’s going to be. Haggard and Sweetwater are at it right from the start and it’s fun watching them play Rock, Paper, Scissors every now and again. But it’s the dialogue that is the funniest. You have to help a convoy by clearing out a crossroads for them and then stop a bombardment by calling in the airforce. That one sentence just doesn’t do the mission justice though as you have to take out squads of enemies (including armoured vehicles), watchtowers and machine gun nests… It’s really quite fun and I can’t wait to get the full version.
But the think most gamers buy Battlefield games is for the multiplayer carnage…
Multiplayer
The problem is lag… LOTS of lag. And who can we blame for this? Turns out that there is something wrong with Microsoft’s servers and that the demo on the Playstation 3 is suffering NO LAG!… Arrgghh. I knew I should have got a PS3 when I could have afforded it.
Read about the lag situation here…
But when you find a game that has no lag then OMG… what a game this is. Some of the things I’ve seen in the game are totally amazing. Like seeing an enemy sniper in a watchtower take cover behind a wall then someone fires an Anti-Tank missile at the wall and blowing the sniper right off the tower. Or watching a group of tanks come over a hill and totally obliterate a base with support from artillery bombardment and a helicopter gunship. A sniper doing recon from the far side of the river pointing out targets for the attacking team. It’s really awesome to see… and play for that matter.
But there are some real concerns about teamplay with this game. The main problem is “squad chat”. Your team is made up of squads of players and you cannot talk to members of another squad. This is rather annoying to say the least. For example I was sat in the machine gunners position of a tank and I spot an enemy tank come up behind us. I yell into the mike… “ENEMY TANK… 6 O’Clock” but he doesn’t answer and just carries on. I yell some more… and some more… still no indication that he’s heard me. Then I realise after I get blown up that the reason he couldn’t hear was that he was in another squad and COULDN’T HEAR ME! To me this is one poorly thought out idea and it is wrecking teamplay.
There are various other glitches with the game. Knife a wooden fence and you have to wait a second before the fence falls apart. Hand throw grenades have great splash damage but rifle fired grenades don’t. You can be at an enemy gold crate and it say “Hold down B to set charge” but even though you are holding down B it doesn’t respond. You have to let go of B and then press it again, wasting precious time. Snipers have a pistol that can kill you with one shot right through body armour but machine gunners have to empty loads of rounds into someone to kill them (nice balancing there DICE… NOT!). Fire a shotgun and it takes half a second to discharge and in that time the enemy has moved out of your aim.
In fact those are just a few of the glitches and design faults… (read about several more on the Ethical Gamer forums)… Hopefully these faults will be removed at launch and the lag based problems will be sorted by Microsoft fixing the servers. It’s now less than two weeks until the retail launch of Bad Company and I’ve already pre-ordered the game, even with the glitches that I know are still there. Apparently DICE know about the glitches and have fixed a lot of them so I’m expecting a patch as soon as retail goes live.
Conclusions
But when it comes down to it, is Bad Company a fun game to play… I think that once the lag situation is sorted (come on Microsoft) then the answer will be “HELL YEAH!”. It’s a great game and it reminds me of the days when I played Counter Strike and then Battlefield: 1942 came out and I migrated from CS to 1942 because the game was so damned huge in comparison. Today it’s COD4 and moving over to Bad Company. History repeats itself once more.
I’d give Battlefield Bad Company 9/10 - it loses a point for the glitches and poor chat support.