Battlefield: Bad Company

I’m going to put off further MGS4 ramblings for a while to talk about Battlefield: Bad Company. Bad Company is DICE’s first game with a true single player story-based campaign, relating the events of the player controlled Preston Marlowe and the other members of the eponymous Bad Company. Based on films such as Kelly’s Heroes and Three Kings, the misfits that make up Bad Company decide to take a side trip away from the war in search of gold. There really isn’t much to say about the story as presented in the game itself. It’s a story that’s relatively safe, taking place in fictional locales and featuring completely generic characters. Like the soldiers in Kelly’s Heroes or Three Kings, Bad Company is disenfranchised by the US Army, but any true anti-war or even anti-bureaucracy commentary is limited to glib one-liners. Oddly, character development itself is limited to promotion videos released before the game in the form of video diaries in which the characters explain their motivations. In the game itself, the characters are limited to their archetypes. Sweetwater is the overeducated big city college boy, Haggard is the simpleton from the south and Redford is the gruff veteran Sergeant who is days away from home. Marlowe, standing in for the player, remains as blank and generic as possible – like many other player characters in FPS games – in order to avoid imposing a character onto the player. With fictional settings and standard war film characters, needless to say that plot itself is fairly safe as well. Our heroes eventually disappear from the US Army’s radar and manage to make off with the gold.

That’s not to say that the game doesn’t offer the comedy of those films. Haggard’s obsession with violence and demolitions certainly offers a few laughs, as does the introduction of Serdar, the eccentric dictator of Serdaristan. Indeed, the absurdity of flying a gold plated helicopter was enough to get me to laugh out loud, a response that not many games can illicit from me. But, the comedy is far from biting. As David Ellis said on a segment for the 1up Show, it’s the type of comedy found in Dumb and Dumber. I don’t want to hold that against the game though. The fact that DICE chose to make a war comedy game in itself is worth praising. In a genre where most developers are trying to emphasize how realistically they can depict the worst aspects of war (the upcoming Brothers in Arms and Call of Duty games promise to be extremely “gritty” in their “dark” depiction of war), it is refreshing to see someone try something different. At the very least, it broadens the genre and perhaps opens the door for other developers to try to provide alternative depictions of war. It’s also worth noting that the video game parodies that were released a week before the game came out were amusing and a good indicator of the humour the developers deployed in the game itself.

I guess I should say something about how the story is actually told in the game. Perhaps coming off of the overly verbose cutscenes in MGS4, I didn’t mind that most of the story here is told through cutscenes either. That said, the final boss battle where you have to shoot down a helicopter with a rocket launcher (or, if you’re a bit crazy, with a laser designator) made me pine for a boss battle with an unnaturally attractive mercenary supermodel in a skin tight animal costume. I do appreciate that they managed to incorporate comedy into their level design and gameplay. I did mention the gold plated helicopter, but there is also a level which takes place on a golf course... and of course, on a golf course, there are golf carts. I will say that being chased by a Russian tank while driving a golf cart through a sand trap is a moment that I would have never imagined playing in a game. It was a ludic moment that made me appreciate how level design and open ended gameplay could create an interesting, but strictly optional, narrative.

One bit of miscellany that I’d like to bring up is the fact that the characters are supported by a faceless woman somewhere away from the fighting. I don’t know if there’s something I want to say about this specifically... certainly there are games that feature female soldiers, but I think it’s an interesting trope that’s used in games. What I like in particular is that in the game the characters sexualize and fetishize her voice. Her call sign, “Mike One Juliet”, becomes “Miss July” among the men in Bad Company, referring of course to the depiction of women in a certain adult magazine. I really don’t want to read into this too much, but needless to say, I found it interesting that it was actually addressed in the game. In Gears of War for example, it’s taken for granted that an attractive woman is giving support to the main characters in the game. I’m sure the developers at Epic Games wanted the player to know that she was attractive, since they took the time to include her in one of the opening cutscenes, but to what end? The female support voice was also found in both Rainbow Six: Vegas games, a few of the Splinter Cell games, and probably in several other games that I am forgetting.

I also feel that I should briefly touch on the gameplay. I want to leave most of that stuff to the other reviews you find out there, because having me tell you about a game’s “tight controls” is probably meaningless in a sea of reviews that write about how a game controls. I just want to point out that this game is perhaps as close as DICE will get to putting a game like Battlefield 2 onto a console. I am frustrated sometimes by the lack of buttons (weapon switching and position switching in a vehicle can be aggravating), but it’s just as fun as BF2. The only major limitation is the lack of team communication (according to DICE, this is due to latency issues) and a console player base that approaches online shooters mostly as team deathmatch who worry only about their scores. But if you’re looking for a new BF2 experience, BF:BC is definitely worth playing... at least until BF3 is released. God, I feel like I just stole that from one of an infinite number of reviews out there. At least I didn’t call the Gold Rush mode compelling.