It also makes the game feel less than tense or realistic. As a result, the game is less than punitive by allowing its player to make scads of mistakes without serious consequence. The convenient but also offputtingly simple mechanic of respawning after dying in combat makes the single player campaign feel more like a multiplayer experience at times, particularly since combat rages on as you respawn at a checkpoint and all the work that you’ve accomplished (buildings blown up and enemies already killed) remains the same.

You can drop smoke and make your way into buildings to clear out the enemy, but you can just as easily blow the wall of a building to expose the opposition to you and your companions’ personal arsenals.Įxplosives come in the form of grenades, rocket launchers, plastic explosives, and even crates and barrels that the inhabitants of the various towns and villages raided by Bad Company have conveniently painted completely red to let your strike force know just exactly what will explode after being hit by a few bullets.Ībsurdities like that one, the ubiquitous and obvious exploding barrel that has become a staple of the FPS, do in fact abound in the game. The impressive destructibility of environments also allows the freedom of choice. Some of that freedom, too, is found in an open approach to combat itself with the freedom to approach the assault of small villages or other military emplacements using a variety of strategies, from urban room-clearing tactics to the mayhem of vehicular assaults to the simple but devestating ability of some pick ups to call in air and artillery strikes. While missions presented from chapter to chapter require the player to most often fulfill a miliatary objective, the larger battlefields offered here in the form of “mini open world” maps offer a chance for exploration (to hunt for collectibles like weapons and the aforementioned gold) by exploring sections of these maps to which you don’t necessarily “need” to go.

The hunt for personal satisfaction and recompense in the form of gold also drives some of the reason for the design of the game itself and the way players might choose to tackle the game. In the context of the game’s story, this is as a result of discovering some battlefield gold early in the game that will drive the company to fulfill their own “side” goals through the course of the plot by collecting wartime booty while carrying out their other orders. Since Bad Company is populated with criminals serving their time by serving their country, Preston and his fellow GIs are extremely self-interested and self-motivated. Yet, as its narrator and protagonist suggests, there is an additional interest in allowing the soldier/player some additional freedoms both in the game’s mechanics as well as its narrative.Īs Preston Marlowe, a new member of Bad Company (a company of rogues and criminals given the dirtiest jobs by their commanders), you serve as both soldier and renegade in a foreign war. Gamers are accustomed, especially in linearly scripted games, to often being given short term directives, and they frequently fulfill them with little particular concern for the larger reasons why.Ĭertainly, sandbox-style games like The Sims exist in which a reason to play must largely be one that “you have to make up on your own,” but this is less often the case in the single player campaigns of first person shooters.īad Company does fall into some familiar territory of the FPS by indeed setting short term objectives for the player within the setting of some kind of fictional “Eurasian” conflict. Given to taking orders and encouraged to not concern themselves with things like reasons in the big picture, soldiers are intended to carry out objectives given to them, not to decide for themselves what motivates them.Ĭuriously enough, soldiering is often a fairly good metaphor for the video game player. It is also a fairly radical statement for any soldier. Given the last few years of grappling with reasons for war in the wake of United States military policy, the protagonist of Battlefield: Bad Company, Preston Marlowe, seems to have a pretty optimistic viewpoint for a soldier. “Wars are fought for many different reasons, and sometimes, when they don’t give you good ones, you have to make up one of your own.”

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