At the end of the day though, it’s not the game’s shortcomings that leave the solo campaign feeling a little sparsely drab: If anything it’s the constant comparisons you’ll find yourself making to the strikingly similar online mode. With a general lack of scripted sections, the solo campaign often relies on emergent gameplay to keep you entertained; unexpected moments of greatness forged by the malleability of the Frostbite engine. It’s all well and good, up until the point when you take the game online. The difference is, rather than having one kid in the sandbox, you’ve now got half a classroom: The moments of grandeur and blind panic come thick and fast as sixteen players battle it out with tanks, guns, and explosives within an environment that’s almost entirely destructible. Imagine for a moment that you’re a duck, if you will (Oh, and imagine that emergent gameplay moments are made entirely of bread. Humour me, I’ll be quick). Happily living day after day being fed the sporadic crumbs of a dried loaf by a couple of pleasant pensioners by your lovely little pond, only to discover one day that just up the road there’s a fucking great big lake surrounded by a small army of Ribena fueled children ceaselessly flinging out handfuls of shredded Hovis, like bridesmaids at a demented baker’s wedding. The single player campaign’s far from terrible, but after dipping your flippers into the truly manic multiplayer mode it’s hard to find yourself enticed to revisit the single player pond.
Dropping into an online game is as simple as selecting quick match; choosing a class; playing, and although many complaints have been made about the stability of BF:BC’s online mode, by and large I’ve found the service to be fast and simple. There are certainly niggles brought up by the system’s simplicity however, as dropping out after a match has finished isn’t as intuitive as you’d expect, and spending unlock points to get more goodies requires you to drop out of the game and go back to the main menus; certainly a dash of bother from time to time, but neither niggle ever truly feeling full-blown irritating. The maps used in Bad Company whilst being massive are chunked up into lovely little sections that are tackled one at a time, the attackers slowly pushing back the defensive forces to different outposts as the sprawling maps evolve as you continually progress through the different stages, or stay the same as the defenders stoically hold their fort. It’s a great idea that stops the distances involved ever really feeling too tedious, and the clear cut nature of the different stages involved on each map quickly become well known as you begin to devise strategies for successfully attacking or defending each zone respectively.
