• Reviewed on: PS3
• Also available for: Xbox 360


• The Good: Great story mode about a group of military misfits prowling for mercenary gold. Wonderfully destructible environments capable of bringing out the demolitions expert in anyone. Simple and addictive multiplayer mode filled with unlockable ranks and rewards.
• The Bad: Campaign favours big bangs over strategy. Just one multiplayer game type. Not available for PC.
• The Verdict: More Three Kings than Saving Private Ryan, the latest Battlefield game takes EA's popular military shooter in a fun and offbeat direction.

The Battlefield games, popular multiplayer sandbox shooters that let players freely roam enormous maps, pick up any weapon they find and pilot all sorts of military vehicles, have been slowly progressing through western conflicts over the last six years. They began on the battlefields of the Second World War before moving to the jungles of Vietnam, the deserts of the Middle East, and, most recently, the frozen wastelands of the future.

But with Battlefield: Bad Company, Swedish developer DICE has decided to abandon the trend of leaping forward with each new game and opted instead to pull the action back to the present. What's more, they've made a concerted effort to create something the franchise has never had before: A lengthy campaign mode with a real narrative.

And, as it turns out, this change of pace is just what Battlefield needed.

DICE'S HEROES

The campaign mode focuses on four soldiers that are a part of an outfit of outcasts — undesirable and expendable GIs that the U.S. military sends into no-win battles. There's the dopey southerner armed with a rocket launcher, the paranoid brainiac who talks too much, a sergeant who took the unenviable job of commanding your squad to shorten his tour, and you, the new guy from whom other soldiers ask to borrow money because they figure you'll be dead before they have to pay it back.

On the fontline in a war against Russia, your crew is continually used and abused by the military brass. Then one day Bad Company snaps and goes AWOL hunting for mercenary gold they hope to use to buy themselves better lives outside the army.

Your squad mates have plenty of quips they yell out mid-firefight, and there's even the occasional goofy in-game stunt, such as when, while storming the private golf course of a megalomaniacal dictator, the squad finds golf carts that they can hop into and drive around as easily as any of the game's military vehicles.

But the gags hardly mean things are any easier than in previous Battlefield games. Indeed, if you decide to take a golf cart for a spin, don't be surprised if your entire squad gets wiped out by a single RPG (plastic carapaces provide precious little in the way of protection).

Like its predecessors, Bad Company falls into the twitchy, hardcore first-person shooter category. Rookies to the franchise shouldn't have any problem skating through on the easiest settings, but on the hardest difficulty the game provides a formidable challenge thanks to crack shot enemies and lower damage tolerance.

On the topic of damage, DICE has done a terrific job of making just about everything in the game capable of being demolished. You can mow down trees and telephone poles, blow gaping cavities in the walls of almost any building and tear through wooden and chain link fences with APCs.

Once I even blew a gigantic hole in the floor of a bridge right in front of my tank ... into which I then clumsily (and comically) proceeded to drive. It doesn't quite match the level of environmental annihilation seen in Crysis, which lets players completely raze buildings and chop trees into small logs, but it's nonetheless quite satisfying.

However, I found all of the destruction had the effect of nullifying the strategy required in previous Battlefield games. Rather than hunkering down and waiting for moments of opportunity or finding ways to flank entrenched enemies, I simply blew up the walls or barriers they were using as cover.

It's still fun, but it is a marked change in the tactics of Battlefields past.

GOLD RUSH

Of course, most fans of the Battlefield games don't spend their $60 thinking about what good times they'll have playing by themselves. DICE's shooters are famous primarily for their sprawling online battles, in which dozens of players fight for control of strategic positions.

But here, too, Bad Company changes the traditional Battlefield formula. Rather than the franchise's traditional Conquest mode, which involves taking and holding control points to whittle down the enemy's stock of reinforcements, the goal here is to either defend or capture crates of gold. Only a couple are available at one time, which gives the defenders a better chance of holding off the invading army. However, once a pair of crates has been captured, it's often a chaotic scramble to reach the location of the next two boxes of gold. The result is a moderately different multiplayer dynamic than that of previous Battlefield games.

New objectives aside, online play is pretty much business as usual. You can still choose from a variety of classes and weapon loadouts, select to respawn at base camp or up by our buddies in the thick of the fight, and increase your rank the more we play, which comes with the typical benefit of unlocking new weapons and gear.

I'd have liked to have seen one or two game types in addition to battling over crates of gold, but there is rumour that the Conquest mode will be released as a downloadable addition some time in the near future.

WHAT'S NEXT FOR BATTLEFIELD?

Battlefield 2142, chronologically the last game in the franchise, was released only for Windows PCs and Mac computers. In contrast, Battlefield: Bad Company marks the first game in the series to be released only for consoles. This is unfortunate, especially in light of the fact that the Battlefield games established a loyal following of PC gamers who have supported the series from the start.

But DICE hasn't forgotten their PC roots. The next game in the franchise, the cartoon-ish Battlefield Heroes, will be available only for Windows PCs when it releases this fall. And as one of the first games released on EA's new Play 4 Free platform, which will see games provided free of charge to players (the business model supplants software sales with advertising and micro-payments for in-game items), it could attract the widest audience of any Battlefield game to date.

Until then, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 owners can sit back and feel a little special as they enjoy this finely crafted console exclusive.