At some point during development, Bad Company’s singleplayer underwent that mysterious process of alchemy which transforms promise into faint disappointment. It’s not that Bad Company is ever anything less than competent – but there are expectations for DICE to deliver something a little special.

Many of those elements which first advertised the game’s potential remain, but are undercut or slightly scaled back: the Frostbite engine winches back the horizons of the mass-combat series, but then funnels your passage between them with linearity. Its world is enriched by colorful characters and a politically irreverent sense of humor drawn from such sources as Three Kings and Kelly’s Heroes – but this ultimately adds little to the moment-to-moment action.

Environments are largely destructible but, not being physics-enabled, they are unpredictably so – seemingly fragile bits of cover inexplicably resisting the force of a grenade while others evaporate. Then there are a handful of design decisions that, while never ruining the singleplayer campaign, continuously remind you of what else it could have been.



Previous attempts to append the genre with singleplayer have often come off as mere preparation for the online offering. This time, it’s down to your surrounding squadmates to uphold a narrative which sets the singleplayer apart from Battlefield’s traditional offering. They are mostly successful; a disposable force of likeable delinquents, tossed into the US army’s sin-bin to face situations deemed too dangerous for more valuable units. Clichés though they are, Sweetwater, Haggart and Sarge are perfectly acceptable companions for your gold-lusting AWOL romp through fictional ex-Soviet Union countries.

Sadly, the nickname for this collection of degenerates, Bad Company, begins to make much more sense in terms of their combat abilities. There’s no command interface to direct their efforts – they potter about nearby, shooting in the vague direction of enemies and blithely voiding your attempts to quietly flank an enemy position. Invincible though they are, they never feel like a fighting force. There’s many an irksome moment when you wish Haggart, the nominal demolitions expert, would actually do his job and take down an attack chopper, or blow the tracks off a tank – allowing you to support him in another role.

Meanwhile, the dastardly Russians will seek shelter in buildings, evade your fire and flank you. Their aim is unerring, zeroing in the second you peek out of cover, even when a forest obscures them from your view. Given the Reds’ almost supernatural levels of competency, it’s a jarring decision to make your allies so wholly ineffectual.



DICE has salted the wound with an overgenerous health system – but even though this prevents the game from being impossibly hard, its execution ends up introducing problems of its own. In a similar attempt to allay difficulty, DICE has opted for instant respawns, with the battle persisting between deaths rather than reverting to an earlier checkpoint. Those you killed remain dead, and you restart a distance away from the fight with the same amount of ammunition you had when you died. It’s an adventurous, if odd, compromise that is inconsistently implemented, sometimes leaving you miles from the battle without ammunition or transport. Both these systems act slightly differently and make a good deal more sense in multiplayer – which, for all DICE’s efforts, still remains the series’ core competency.

Here the singleplayer mix-and-match of tools and weapons is dropped in favor of a class system similar to that of previous Battlefield games – and, just as with those games, it’s an intelligently balanced and pacey experience. Syringes take longer to boost your health and are available only to certain classes, but the kitbags through which class is defined can be swapped for those of fallen soldiers. This latter point reduces the occasional annoyance of needing to traverse open ground with only short-range weapons at your disposal but, given the variation of geography each map contains, the specialization of each class can often feel as if it’s limiting, rather than empowering, the player.

The ability to spawn in to your squad’s location helps to cut down long journey times, but also leads to alarming moments when a one-on-one battle is harshly tipped in one side’s favor by the sudden materialization of an ally with a full health bar. These oddities aside, Bad Company’s multiplayer happily checks off the expectations the series has created. Vehicle handling is smooth and controllable – going for accessibility over realism in spite of the developer’s determinedly unconventional button configuration. Maps are varied experiences, both in their settings and the speed of play they encourage. Online, DICE has created an experience that is a fine successor to the franchise – and much of the singleplayer’s awkwardness can be explained by indecision over which elements of multiplayer should be included. Ultimately, given the decision not to go for straight bot-match, DICE might have been wise to make a clean break between the two.

Verdict: 7/10