Trees crack and splinter as bullets rake through them. You scramble for cover, abandoning your spot. The house you dive into seems like a safe haven until the wall in-front of you collapses under the rocket of an RPG, leaving you spraying rounds into the rubble filled mist, panicking and confused. All the while the biggest grin fills your face. This is nuts.
That was my first impression of the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 beta. Chaotic, yet great fun. But it’s a very tactical game, something that is not obvious at first, with all your team-mates either camping back, sniping or charging forward recklessly. But once you get a good balance of classes and squads worked out, the games run more smoothly.
The classes will be familiar to any Battlefield fan with the options of assault, engineer, medic and recon. You need your recon to pick out enemies from far away while your medics and assault troops can pile forward, healing and resupplying each other as they go. The engineers can either repair tanks with their arc-welder or take them down with their RPG’s – you can almost do a Team Fortress 2 medic ‘Übercharge’ by having two engineers follow a tank, repairing it as it goes.
The vehicles add an interesting dynamic to the combat, as well as add to the continuing feel of madness. The attacking force will need the quad bikes and light tanks to capture the enemies control points (M-COM Stations), forcing them back to the new base, while the defenders need them to shut down said charge. Each game variates between attacking and defending, with the goal of destroying the two control points and pushing the defending team back to a previously unlocked section of the map. The attackers have a limited amount of spawns to do this while the defenders have an unlimited number, creating a mad dash at the end for the last point – nothing better than doing an Arnie style rush through enemy fire to arm the bomb in the last spawns of the round.
Sometimes you have a large distance to travel from the spawn point to the control point, and when you cannot rely on vehicles then you have to rely on squads. You have the choice of being put into a squad of random players, or create one with your friends. When you die you can re-spawn next to your living team-mates and continue the attack from the front-line. This is where all the strategy kicks in. It is always important to have one of your squad suppressing just outside the kill-zone, letting you and your buddies spawn next to them. Again, having a medic to revive and heal you, and an engineer to take down tanks, is vital to your survival.
But if you are just looking for an FPS that is loads of fun, then BF:BC 2 is the game for you – vehicles, destructive scenery and massive maps create a cocktail of hilarity. The engine works really well with explosions looking very realistic and showing little frame-rate issues. This is definitely going to challenge Modern Warfare 2, making new fans and possibly stealing a few of the old faithful. Keep your eye on this one, possibly one of the multiplayer games of the year.
