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– Track design feature restricted to NDS
Fri, 1st Aug 2008
FYI, this story is more than a year old

When I first heard about Battlefield: Bad Company, I was already a seasoned veteran of Call of Duty 4 on the Xbox 360. Battlefield: Bad Company is similar to Call of Duty 4 because it’s a game about war and you get to shoot at things often. But Battlefield is also a franchise that has had a good run on both the PC and Xbox 360 and in a lot of ways is quite different to CoD4 and for this reason alone it’s worth the play.

I am a multiplayer freak when it comes to Xbox 360 games and I live for the multiplayer action but Battlefield: Bad Company has a single player campaign that is well worth playing if you want to learn about the characters in the game, the weapons and the vehicles. It’s a ‘tutorial’ type of campaign where you go from point A to point B, acquiring achievements as you progress and learning about the weapons and general game play. Does that mean you can’t jump straight into the multiplayer action? Hell no, quite the opposite in fact.

And the multiplayer gameplay of Battlefield: Bad Company is really the game’s strong point because unlike Call of Duty 4, Bad Company concentrates on a wider variety of weapons and includes vehicles in the core game strategy. This both improves and extends the game play options for the players, giving squads of teams the ability to use tanks, helicopters and heavy artillery weapons in their assault. The main theme of the multiplayer game is team versus team on the battlefield where the primary objective is to either attack or defend crates of gold.

The weapon upgrade system is also quite well structured, where you can unlock certain weapons and add-ons to improve your gameplay (ranking up to Private and unlocking the health (life) injector is REALLY helpful early on in the game). If you can battle through the barrage of US based players online when you connect to servers, you will thoroughly enjoy the online multiplayer aspect of the game. It’s probably best to find a group of local NZ gamers to buddy up with though because lag will become a factor if you’re playing on a US based host.