Bad Company makes blowing stuff up fun.
And more precisely, it’s more like blowing holes through any building that gets in your way. EA weren’t lying when they mentioned that "Battlefield: Bad Company environments are highly destructible" – any building that gets a good ’nade heading at it will shortly enjoy a nice hole through its exterior.
But EA would be lying if they used the phrase "completely destructible environments." Sure, you can do a lot of damage to most residences, but you won’t be able to completely decimate them (apparently fireplaces can take a hell of a beating). There will also be the occasional fence that’ll curiously still be standing after taking on a maelstrom of gunfire. The Frostbite engine, evidently, isn’t perfect. But then again, it does a pretty fine job for what it can do – most everything that you’d expect to be destructible will be destructible. And possibly the most practical use for destructible environments is uncovering hidden enemies; if you suspect that an enemy wimp is having a camp-out in a certain building, you can blow a hole in said building and remove him from the picture.
That enemy wimp, however, will most likely take a few potshots at you before he goes down. One of the most disappointing things about Bad Company’s single-player mode is that the A.I. pretty much sucks the fun out of everything. Forget about being Sam Fisher here, hiding deep in the shadows and taking your enemies by surprise – most likely your enemies already know you’re there. And if they don’t notice you at first, they’ll be all up on you once you make your first shot. At first I thought this was evidence of a very clever and sophisticated A.I., but a while into the game I realized that the A.I. was simply cheating. Having your enemy track you down with such pinpoint accuracy at every moment starts feeling absurd after the first few encounters. You will almost never know that your enemies are lurking around until they start shooting at you, and even then it’ll be tough to locate them because they’ll be shooting at you from ludicrous range.
The weird thing about the A.I. is that they’re absolutely menacing from far away because of their superhuman sensory abilities, but they’re pretty much useless once you get close to them. Sometimes they’ll just stand there for a second or two before doing anything, during which you can dispose of them handily. There is, no doubt, a strange disparity between A.I. skill in ranged battles and close quarters combat.
It’s really too bad Bad Company’s A.I. kills the party, because otherwise the game’s single-player mode is positively ace. The control mechanics are solid – you wouldn’t expect anything less from a big-name FPS – and the game has a distinct feeling of open-endedness that always keeps the level of danger appropriately dangerous. Here there’s always a sense that anything can happen, and indeed, everything does happen in the Bad Company universe. Enemies can come out of nowhere (admittedly, this would sound better if the A.I. weren’t such party poopers), blood-pumping events can take place in an instant (it can be rollicking fun hanging onto your life by a thread), and your mission objectives can change on a whim (mid-game story twist, anyone?). And all this is complemented by excellent voice acting and sound effects, not to mention an alternately "epic battle" and "swaggering tunes" soundtrack that works oh-so-well for the vibe of the game.
How about the visuals? Well, overall, they’re not bad. Everything has a slight trace of murkiness, but that could be an intentional addition to the art style. Either way, Bad Company’s graphics are certainly better than most titles out there – you just might wish occasionally for crisper eye candy.
By the way, you won’t be alone during your romp through enemy territory. You’ll share your time with three other "almost got sent to jail" misfits (you’re in B-Company, or the titular Bad Company) who provide a bit of comic relief. You’ve got Sweetwater and Haggard, who play rock-paper-scissors in their free time between battles. Then there’s Sergeant Redford, who loves to say, "Shut up, Sweetwater" and who, if you stare at him for too long, eyes you angrily and says – Duke Nukem style – "What is it with you?"
