Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Review

Made for PC?

What Bad Company 2 also brings back to the Battlefield franchise that has been sorely missing is really cool weapons. Well technically it’s just the standard modern day weapon inventory you’d get almost anywhere, but between great models, textures, animations and sound effects every weapon feels fun to use.

Whether you’re blasting buildings apart with rockets, laying down controlled bursts with an assault rifle or putting in big booming hits with a shotgun there’s real beef to the weaponry which again adds to the atmosphere of the game. DICE has managed once again to tap into the childish joy of shooting guns at people and things.

Outside of shooting other people the effects are equally good when you’re on the receiving end. There’s blood and dust aplenty from bullet hits and the death animations are suitably cinematic without being needlessly unpleasant or overly silly. The border that appears around the screen when you get hurt is obvious, but understated. Even when you’re about to die you can still actually play the game, which is a big plus.

Unlike many console games the frame rate for the PC version of Bad Company 2 is unlocked so you can run it as fast as you can get it to go. The visual settings are comprehensive enough that you can scale everything right back for an older system or ramp things up above and beyond their console limitations if you’re running the game on a monster rig.


Performance on multiplayer servers is of course variable depending on where and what the server you select to play on is, but since you get to pick the server yourself as opposed to relying on feeble match-making systems there’s no reason that you’d have to worry about server performance.

While technically Bad Company 2 is a console shooter that has come to the PC it’s clear that DICE have done the work to make it work on the different format. Aside from the cosmetic and convenience elements like the menu systems and multiplayer server lists the game plays like a PC shooter too. The characters move quickly, particularly when sprinting and the weapons are accurate and powerful, the pace of combat feels nicely pitched and there is no feeling that you are being slowed down to accommodate control pad sighting.

The removal of the ability to go prone has upset some fans and it is understandable, in a game where it is so easy to get killed and so difficult to really get safe it seems like madness to not include this simple life saving mechanic. However, there is clear method to this decision, forcing players to move to stay alive, rather than letting them simply hunker down, makes for a much more dynamic game. If you move to cover and the enemy saw you move to cover then first they kill the cover, then they kill you, so you have to be constantly on the move.


There are still campers with sniper rifles and the lack of a prone function hasn’t done anything to shift them as some thought it might do, but then in any game which includes sniper rifles you’ll find people wanting to stand as far back as possible from the action to use them. What the lack of a prone position does do is make use of sniper rifles harder against the better players. In the older Battlefield games on the PC players would lie prone to shoot from cover and such players could be picked off as sitting ducks by well placed snipers. A moving target is harder to hit than stationary one, even if he is lying down.

It is fair to say that Bad Company 2 is, at last, a return to form for the Battlefield series on the PC. The multiplayer is all there and all good with the proper server browser options present and accounted for. The graphics, sounds and art style bring back fond memories of Battlefield 2, yet significantly improved. Everything fans of Battlefield 2 could want is there. Plus there’s also a decent singleplayer game bolted on for good measure.

Plenty of games are released on PC and console with little or no consideration of the different formats and very often they suffer as a result. It’s refreshing to see a game like Bad Company 2, a first person shooter and as mainstream as they come, released on the PC not only with a significant redesign of menus and multiplayer systems but also with a willingness to embrace the greater power of the system through things like higher player numbers per server (32 instead of 24) and better graphics.

If more developers become willing to embrace the extra power afforded by the PC as a gaming platform could we start to see the beginning of the end for this generation of consoles?