Battlefield: Bad Company

DICE's console shooter has teamwork at its heart.

	Version 360, PS3	Developer DICE	Publisher EA	Genre FPS

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By Alex Wollenschlaeger

War may be hell in the real world, but in the pret a detruire battlefields of DICE's latest console exclusive, it's a heady experience where teamwork counts and persistence matters. It's also a hell of a lot of fun.

I began my tour of Battlefield: Bad Company for the Xbox 360 (also out on PS3) in the much ballyhooed singleplayer portion of the game. Here you play Preston Marlowe, a newcomer to B Company (or Bad Company as they like to call themselves), in a mission set in eastern Europe. The thematic draw here is that, as in the 1999 Clooney-Wahlberg-Cube movie Three Kings, our heroes aren't as morally restrained as we'd like our troops to be, and they spend their downtime in the field looking for gold bullion. Despite these flaws, the four squad members come across as likable guys making the best of a bloody situation that is largely out of their control.

For the most part, the singleplayer is a perfunctory part of the game, serving more than anything as intense preparation for the main multiplayer mode. Having said that, the singleplayer mode performs this task well, familiarizing you with the vehicles and heavy guns that play such an important part in the destroying the terrain while at the same time offering something to play during those times when EA's servers are on the brink (and when I played, that was worryingly often).

For all the attention DICE has clearly given to the multiplayer mode it's disappointing that there is such a limited amount of it to enjoy now. The team has already conceded that following fan protests it will add Conquest mode, as made famous in previous instalments, as a free download at some point, but for now players are stuck with ranked and non-ranked versions of Gold Rush mode. Not that this is a bad thing.

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