Bad Company: First Impressions

posted by Jaitu at 11:25

Battlefield: Bad Company arrived through the post yesterday. I had already played through the demo and that had convinced me to buy the full product.
Upon playing the game you instantly get a sense that some thing slightly different is in store. On the surface BC is very similar to COD4. Both are military FPS in a modern setting. Both follow a mission structure in the single player campaign and both were developed primarily with the multiplayer component in mind.
Despite my limited time with BC there are significant differences in evidence right from the outset. The main menu music could not be more different. In COD4, as with most games of this type, the theme music has a very cinematic score feel in the style of a Tom Clancy or Bruckheimer movie. Bad Company has some laid back jazz.
The main characters are the comedic trio of Sarge, Sweetwater and Haggard who constantly quip and taunt each other as well as 'New Guy' Preston (played by you). A couple of obvious game play differences are the lack of regenerative health and a persistence of the world when you inevitably die. Unlike many recent games you must manually apply a health boost whenever your injuries begin to mount up. You do this by equipping one of an endless supply of syringes and using it. This means you cannot use you weapon and so it helps to take cover when treating yourself. In practice this is no different to finding somewhere safe to recover automatically except that you have to consciously intervene. There are also fewer indicators that your health is getting low so one eye must be kept on your health stat in the corner of the screen. Should you forget the penalty for dying doesn't seem so harsh here either. Unlike similar mission based games you do not have to restart the mission from the beginning should you fall. Instead you re-spawn at the last checkpoint and make your way back into the fight complete with any weapons you were carrying before you died. This makes the game more dynamic as you are not constantly repeating scripted sequences and the enemy continue to move and adapt as you re-spawn. This may become a situation of 'infinite lives' where you could simply rush in, chip away, die, rush in, chip away etc... So far I have not encountered any situation that suggests the streams of never ending enemy soldiers such as you would frequently find in COD4.
Unfortunately I won't get a chance to playing anything more for a day or two but I am really looking forward to getting back to Bad Company.