Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Review

Mon Jan 16. 2023

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Review

Just under a decade ago, military shooters were considered a novelty, a very innovative genre, defined by the first games in the Battlefield and Call of Duty series. As the genre evolved and the years passed though, it turned out to become one of the most popular genres in the industry today.

And if back then it was enough to show a shooter with a military setting to get a lot of attention, today developers really have to work hard in order to stand out from the crowds and attract new players. Even before it came out, just looking at the first pieces of media from it, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was an obvious hit coming our way.

Gameplay

The game is set in present day – fans of the series may have noticed that the series is slowly establishing in this period, as the first game started out in World War 2 and the series eventually progressed all the way to a futuristic setting, eventually moving backwards a bit with the next few games all set in modern times.

It features a rather short, but exhilarating single player campaign, which puts you in the boots of Private Preston Marlowe, who must go through a plot good enough to make a movie from, in order to turn the tides of war. The missions flow very nicely between each other, and even though the game ends sooner than you'd wish it did, it'll still leave you very satisfied with the experience.

The multiplayer is, as is common lately, the main focus of the gameplay. In this department, you have a variety of game modes to choose from, some of which are returning from the previous games in the series, such as Conquest. One of the more interesting ones which managed to get a lot of attention, was Onslaught, which puts you in a cooperative battle allied with a few other players against constantly spawning waves of soldiers controlled by the computer – imagine playing Left 4 Dead, only you're fighting soldiers and not zombies.

Graphics and System Requirements

The Frostbite engine from the previous Bad Company returns, and it's received quite the noticeable face-lift. The easiest way to describe the change would be to simply say that there's more of everything – higher resolution textures, more polygons on the models, more keyframes for the animations, everything is just better. The physics system is especially remarkable, with some semi-realistic environment destruction functionality allowing you to blast new ways through the levels.

Bad Company 2 requires a formidable computer to run it well though – you'll need at least a Dual Core processor running at 2 GHz, 2 GB of RAM and a GeForce 7800 GT or ATi's equivalent X1900. The engine is very well-optimized for multiple cores though, so if you've got a quad core CPU, you should benefit a lot from it.

Other

We know that Bad Company 2 has been seeing a lot of criticism from fans of Modern Warfare 2, and the other way around is completely true as well – but don't just follow the crowd's opinion – get a copy of each, try them and see for yourself which one you like more. They're really too different to make a valid comparison.

Conclusion

Bad Company 2 will be played for a long time – at least until Infinity Ward come out with the next Call of Duty and DICE decide to return the “favor” – but don't worry, looking at both games' popularity, they'll be around for a while.