Even beyond expectations of a First-Person Shooter from Electronic Arts & EA DICE, Battlefield Bad Company 2 is able to deliver a thrilling, hilarious, beautiful campaign, while throwing one of the best multiplayer experiences ever seen on the Xbox 360 and Xbox LIVE.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 • EA DICE • Electronic Arts • Modern Tactical First-Person Shooter • March 2nd, 2010 • MATURE (Blood, Strong Language, Violence)
XBOX 360: 1 Player Multiplayer Matchmaking In-Game Dolby Digital HDTV 720P/1080i/1080p 1MB TO SAVE GAME, REQUIRED HARD DISK DRIVE (HDD) XBOX LIVE: Online Multiplayer - 2-24 Players via Xbox LIVE Game-Content (DLC) Downloads Leaderboards In-Game Voice
INFORMATION: GAME PACKAGE , XBOX.COM

Overview
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 picks up from it's predecessor, Battlefield: Bad Company, which was a more character-driven game, that really didn't success the way it was expected to. While Battlefield: BC2 picks up on the campaign from Battlefield: BC, the new installment is able to switch off from an excellent campaign onto competitive multiplayer, usually consisting of teams of twelve, pending on which gametype you play. Battlefield Bad Company 2 is not only an excellent game overall, packing in amazing graphics and cinematic sequences, along with hilarious quotes from the team of soldiers (Bad Company), Battlefield: BC2 has what most games on the Xbox 360 console do not- a large, squad-based multiplayer, which gives you a large amount of weapons, perks, and more. Unlike other First Person Shooters on the Xbox 360, and of course other consoles, Battlefield: BC2 makes the purpose of playing reality, and the purpose of staying alive more understandable. The ongoing repetition of other games, and the ongoing loadout of the same weapons that seem to literally take the fun out of the game, which you can easily see in many popular FPS such as Call of Duty, is an unknown thing in Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

Campaign (Single Player, No Cooperative)
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (BFBC2, as we'll be relating it to for now on) continues from its predecessor, Battlefield: Bad Company. You will follow the group of soldiers known as 'Bad Company,' who are assigned various jobs throughout the campaign. You'll play as Preston, fighting along side with Sarge, the group leader, Sweetwater, the tech expert, and Haggard, the hippie-hating badass (who later goes on to find the hippie copper pilot one of his best friends. He even gets him some smokes).

From snow-white mountains, to jungles in South America, the campaign is very spread out, similar to the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 campaign. The campaign simply is amazing, and the story is great and ongoing. You'll never be left out on information, at least not the whole time, until you get to the end. The story is hard to understand if you haven't played the game before, but this is only at first, and by the time you're halfway done, you'll memorize everything. Luckily, the campaign is decently sized, and much harder to go through. We played the game on medium and died a lot. And we mean a lot. It's still not the breakthrough 15 hour campaign, but it lets you get onto the great multiplayer.

Characters play huge roles, and you're usually never separated from the group, excluding some missions. Your hippie helicopter pilot who finds getting his smokes more important than escaping an RPG makes some non-main characters effective in the game. Sadly, the friendly-AI isn't all that great- not sucky, but you still have to the majority of the work. The enemy AI can suck too, mainly because they will always know where you are; it's almost impossible to sneak by, or even get up from bleeding without being spotted by the enemies who don't even know you exist over there. Besides those annoyances, the characters and AI are still able to level it out to a good notch.

Some bad points in the campaign are hard to point out. Unfortunately, sometimes the missions just make you feel like you have to go shoot some guys, with no reason why- no objective to get to, which will obviously be told to you later on in the mission. The missions are fun in fact, and the campaign is always funner when you got guys making jokes at each other, even mentioning how "snowmobiles are for sissies" during a race on ATVs; relating to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. No doubt that the campaign is amazing, the only lost is that it would be more amazing to play it cooperatively, with a friend.

Overall, campaign is great. I may have already said that, but still- proving my point. Its got the interesting story base, its got the weapons, its got the vehicles, its got the funny, its got the blow sh*t up. Its got it all. Although it could have been longer and better cooperatively, Battlefield: Bad Company 2's campaign delivers what you'd expect.

Multiplayer (No Split-Screen, Ability to Play W/ XBL Friends, No System Link, No Private Matches, Up to 24 Player Matches)
Multiplayer experiences throughout the past, that we've seen on Xbox LIVE, have been great, sometimes amazing, but usually just have the usual old repetition- once you die, you're back to pwn. But, in BFBC2, this is all redefined. The Halo series by Bungie and Microsoft Game Studios sports a similar feature, but BFBC2 really pushed it out. The thing: A Reason To Live. In Battlefield: BC2, there is actually a point in being alive, and staying alive. Once you get a kill, you literally feel like screaming. While I over exaggerated that, if you play the game, you'll see why I did. The multiplayer in BFBC2 is very Objective-based, excluding Squad Deathmatch, and therefore sports a reason to live.

Killing is art in this game, and you can do this easily. Along with the 5 Second respawn time, you'll have every ability to change classes, all of it. You're given four classes: Assault, Engineer, Medic, and Recon. Assault is mainly regular assault rifles, that sport a short to medium range.

To be ultimately successful with the Assault Class, you'll need to learn accuracy (which by the way; all the guns are very accurate- but you need to learn how to control the [very] high power recoil on each gun), and you'll need to learn how to do short bursts. As said before, the guns are accurate, but aren't going to be the whole magazine.

Engineer is mainly used for destroying, repairing, and getting in vehicles. You're given an RPG7, that non-locking on Russian launcher, along with a vehicle repair drill thingy that repairs vehicles while holding down the right trigger (shoot button). For example, If your vehicle has 50% left in its damage resistance, you can get out of the vehicle, that is, if you're driving it, and pull out the drill, hold it down on the vehicle, and it takes about 10-15 seconds to fully repair the vehicle and put it back up to 100%. Luckily, you can do this on any vehicle, and you can also of course change out the RPG7 for a different launcher. You're given a Submachine Gun as your primary weapon.

Medic hands you a Light Machine Gun, along with the magic revivers. The magic revivers (not actually the name) have every ability to revive a teammate by just going over the dead body, and pressing the trigger, and bam. Alive. You also get the little health packs, which help out your teammates, give them ammo, etc. You can have these health packs on every class, but it's required use in my book if you're using medic. Required by the USKB.

Then, moving on you go onto Recon. Everybody thinks they're a frickin' sniper. Well, you're not. Even with the best accuracy since Halo 3, these kids who think they're a sniper, are far from it. In other words, every kid there sucks. Why every kid? Because every kid thinks they're a sniper. Anyway, I'll do my flame wars later. Obviously you're given a sniper. You can choose a large variety of snipers, but you're first given a bolt action rifle, pretty much the first bolt action sniper you saw in CoD4: Modern Warfare. Otherwise, the class is basic; you even get C4. Like two C4 can take out a tank. So FTW.

You also get a bunch of perks (which is what I call them, they're actually known as weapon and vehicle upgrades) that can use, such as stronger vehicle resistance or red dot sight, or 4X Scope (ACOG), etc. The perks enhance the gameplay for you, and like Call of Duty, you get three to choose for each class. Pretty. Along the long way, you earn guns via points that you earn (EXP or XP for some of you people), and it can take up to 5 games to just level up if you're averaging 5rd to 8th place. It takes a lot, but go for it.

Many vehicles are available in multiplayer, sorting from Tanks, to Vans (as I call them), to UAV Mini Apaches. All of them are amazing in their own ways. There are about four different tanks, probably more, and there are a few of those vans. They're actually just transporting vehicles that have a large high-powered turret on the back. Along with those, there are Helicopters, which I crash in all the time, and a UAV. The UAV is unlike most UAV's that you would think- it's a mini helicopter. Even boats, ATV's and more are in the game, so if you're looking for a shooter with vehicles- think of Battlefield: BC 2. With all those vehicles in mind, you gotta think of the maps. With 8 huge maps overall, 24 player games are perfect. The maps spread from the sandy desert, to Autumn island, to even a remote jungle. Once you go into gameplay modes, you can be in a squad (sometimes required), with up to four people (or less; again, depends on what you're playing). One Gameplay mode is Rush, which has two objectives to destroy, which as the attacker, you must destroy, and as the defender, you must protect. It takes only about 5 seconds to arm the bomb as an attacker, but it takes around 15 to 20 seconds to disarm the bomb as a defender. There is an alternate mode for this, in which you play with one squad, and you play against only two other squads, with only one bomb to arm or disarm. By the way, the 'bombs' are actually known as "M-COM Stations" in the game. C00. Then you go onto another mode, which is known as Conquest, which requires you to capture a territory, in which an player must stay within 10 or 15 yards of a flag, where the enemy flag automatically goes down, and yours raises, as time pasts when you're in the territory area.. Unlike Rush, there's no defense or offense- both teams must capture and re-capture the flags. It takes around 20 seconds to get their flag down, and yours up. Then you got Squad Deathmatch, which is all new to the Battlefield series. Squad Deathmatch is a deathmatch game with 4 squads overall, and the first squad to 50 kills is the winner. FTW!

Overall, the campaign experience is great. Excluding the whole "everyone is a sniper" thing, the multiplayer is awesome. Competitive, non-repetitive, and just overall greatness. The huge maps bring out the best in the multiplayer, excluding the fact that there are only a few maps for each gametype. Luckily, DICE is here to rescue us all- because A.) They're releasing map packs, and B.) They seem like the company that would deliver like six map packs. The large amount of weapons is great, and unlike most class-based shooters- you have to really work for a new ranking and more guns. One downside is that the games are extremely long, usually, and if you quit the game, you get no experience points, or anything towards your new weapon or upgrades. Some several server issues exist in the game, due to the fact that EA feels cool with its own servers, but those seemed to be usually taken care of by Electronic Arts. I can't complain much, they're doing their best to fix it.

UPDATE: Battlefield Bad Company 2 does in fact support private matches, but requires at least 12 players. I think. I realized this after I learned what playing with a friend was.
 

Soundtrack, Visuals, Audio.
Battlefield Bad Company 2 really delivers one of the best audio and scores I've seen from a game in a while. Gun sounds, grenades, tanks, and all that good stuff, has amazing sound quality, and sounds more than realistic. You can go from first-person in a jeep to third-person and see how realistic the sounds are. In first-person, you can hear the engine rumbling, with all that good diesel quality. Third-person, you got less noise from the jeep, and more noise around you. Hard to explain, but easy to understand if you've seen it; well in this case, heard it. The Soundtrack is great, the score being composed by Mikael Karlsson. I wouldn't say it's 'Marty [O'Donnell] Material,' but it's still great. Nothing better than "Snowy Mountains" and "Snowblind,"  which you can listen to here, along with the rest of the soundtrack. It's kay, we don't give bad links, it's by EA.

Visual wise, the game is very pretty. There is no doubt that there are some small bugs, but overall, the graphics are very clean, and are even nice during the destruction of buildings. Guns look realistic, explosions are realistic, and, well, everything else is too. The game compared to the cinematic (cutscenes in the campaign) parts are very similar. There is no outstanding difference to where you're more excited to see the wonderful clips in-between the ongoing scrappy firefight. It's very balanced.
 

That is all.
We enjoyed playing Battlefield Bad Company 2. We enjoy serving you, even if it took us like 4-5 hours to write the review. Otherwise, go play BFBC2. Worth the money, that is, if you like shooters. If not, lay off.


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