Preview: Battlefield Bad Company Demo Impressions

If you can't beat them, blow them up.

So, as you know a little while back I put up my impressions of the Bad Company Multiplayer Beta. My thoughts on the game were mostly positive and felt they only needed to fix a few things. Notably, the balance in the Goldrush mode and a few bugs they needed to clean up.

So, since I already wrote about the Multiplayer I will focus on the single player part of the demo. The mission in the demo is called "Welcome to Bad Company" and it is pretty obvious that it is the first mission in the game. The cutscenes in the game easily have some of the best character models and lighting I have seen in a game. Once you get into the action there isn't a whole lot of hand holding. There are control tips that pop up, but there is no real tutorial and the game realizes that you are probably a at least decently intelligent person.

Now, there is a story here, but in all honesty I just skipped most of the cutscenes to get to the action. The basic gist if the story is that your character would've been sent to prison, but instead was sent to work with the Army's "B-Company" who is a ragtag group of tough guys blah, blah, blah. All you need to know is that a lot of stuff explodes. The game plays very well, although I did have to turn down the sensitivity a bit because at the default I couldn't control my aim very much at all.

Now, the major problem I saw in the demo is that, at times, there is WAY too much going on at one time. The final sequence of the demo is especially chaotic, often leading to times where I had no idea where I was going or where I was being shot from. Thankfully, at no time did the framerate drop during times where I would be taking out buildings with an RPG while bullets flew by me. There is some screen tearing so if that bothers you, just know that it is there.

A quick aside about multiplayer. I only played two games of it but did notice a few new things. It definitely feels more polished than the beta which was expected. They tweaked some of the UI to make it a little easier to use, and it seems like they did go back and balance Goldrush so that the better team was always winning. Now, like I said, this is from only two 30 minute games so impressions may change in the future, but all in all it seems like Bad Company it going to be a solid FPS with really fun multiplayer and plenty of destruction.

by Nicolas Perez