Battlefield Bad Company 2 Preview

Multiplayer

While the single player campaign is enjoyable - if a little perfunctory - the real meat of the game is the multiplayer.

Bad Company 2 features four multiplayer game modes. Rush and Squad Rush modes are focussed on capturing objectives. Conquest mode requires players to dominate a map by holding victory points and killing the enemy and Squad Deathmatch has four man squads fight it out with the emphasis on just killing the enemy as opposed to taking ground.

The squad gameplay will be recognisable to those familiar with the older games in the series such as Battlefield 2, but it has changed somewhat. Squads now consist of only four players but the ability to respawn on the leader is retained.

As with previous Battlefield games there's a range of vehicles to monkey about in including heavy tanks and attack helicopters. While offering new and exciting ways to kill large numbers of the opposing team, not to mention level almost the entire map, these vehicles also present a large target to the enemy and are not too difficult to take down with the right weapons.


The combination of heavily armed vehicles and the capacity to destroy most of the game environment means that although the game boasts eight different maps with a variety of features most tend to look like ground zero of a nuclear test by the end of the game.

Another stalwart of the Battlefield series is the ability to pick a class. The four on offer are Recon, Assault, Medic and Engineer. These roles are pretty flexible from the get-go, for instance the medic can wield a light machinegun if he wants to, but over time they can diversify even further with a character customisation and ranking system which allows you to change and upgrade weapons and abilities.


Bad Company 2 also boasts a hardcore mode, which removes a lot of the gamey elements of combat such as health recovery, weapon crosshairs when firing from the hip and the mini map. Although this sort of game style does have a lot of appeal one can’t help but feel in a game where you can’t recover health and where weapons are even more lethal the lack of an ability to look round corners or hit the deck is felt even more sharply.

Although it’s clear from the ground up that Bad Company 2 is one of those much maligned console shooters it's still definitely setting its stall out to raise the bar, at least in multiplayer. By appearing on the PC Bad Company 2 is inviting comparisons with the classic Battlefield 2, though only time will tell if it can live up to the rose tinted memories of nights spent playing Strike at Karkand. The game is out on the 5th of March, and we'll have a review up a few days before that, so stay tuned.