Leveling Down

The snow-based Port Valdez is the one playable map in the demo

The Battlefield: Bad Company 2 demo was just released last week on the Xbox 360, so I got a chance to play around with it for a couple hours in the last few days. PS3 owners have been lucky as they had access to the beta since last November.

Read on for my likes and dislikes, as well as my initial comparisons to the first Bad Company.

For the record, I’ll say that I enjoy Modern Warfare series more than the Bad Company series. That doesn’t mean that I dislike the Bad Company series nor appreciate its strengths, but if the Bad Company 2 demo is any indication, I don’t think it has enough to really dethrone Modern Warfare 2.

What I noticed most when playing Bad Company 2 is that there doesn’t seem to be many changes since the first one. The Gold Rush style mode from the first game returns where one team tries to blow up several pairs of crates, pushing the defenders further and further back down the map until either the Attackers run out of “respawns” or the Attackers destroy the last crates. Vehicles, such as tanks and helicopters are still prominent. Squads are still in groups of four and you can spawn on any other member in your squad provided he is still alive somewhere. Prone is still not possible. The walls of buildings are still quite destructible. And finally, the overall feel is still carried forth from Bad Company 1 – namely, everything is slower, heavier, and you will find that it is harder to kill opponents in Bad Company 2 than in Modern Warfare 2.

There are a couple differences that I’ve noticed so far between the first Bad Company and this demo. The first is that instead of the original’s 5 different classes you could pick (Assault, Demolition, Recon, Specialist, and Support), the sequel has condensed these classes into 4: Assault, Engineer, Medic, and Recon. The Engineer class seems to be a combination of the Demolition and Specialist class now, as he carries anti-tank weapons and a silenced SMG while the C4 was moved to the Recon class.

The other major difference I noticed between the first Bad Company and this one is that enemy indicators no longer appear. In the original Bad Company, if an opposing player without a silenced weapon fired his gun, he would light up on the map, and if you looked in that general direction, you would see an Orange triangle above him to indicate his position. If I remember correctly, even if you just looked in a general direction and saw opponents, they would light up with the orange indicators for everyone on your team. This has all been removed in Bad Company 2.

At first I thought it was ridiculous that these indicators were all removed – as it was hard enough as it was trying to determine where opponents were. But now that I’ve played it for a while longer, I think it’s a good change. It nerfs the “ninjaness” of the Specialist’s silenced weapon some since no one shows up on the radar now, but it gives a slight boost to the attacking team. In the first Bad Company, the Attackers always had a much harder time blowing up the crates because the Defenders could just camp and any time the Attackers fired, their positions were given away. Now that their positions aren’t given away, the Attackers have a little bit more on their side for destroying the crates.

Some minor differences that I was not a super fan of include the removal of your health bar. Your health doesn’t regenerate in Bad Company 2, but apparently in Bad Company 2 you are not able to know how much health you have remaining. I was looking all over the HUD for my HP, but I couldn’t find it. Either it was placed in a very unintuitive area, or it was just removed altogether. The second thing I did not like was that the speed of the knife attack was reduced considerably. The first Bad Company also had knife strikes, where one knife was a kill and collected you a dog tag. The knife strike in Bad Company 1 was still not at the speed of Modern Warfare’s knife attack, but Bad Company 2 is even slower – perhaps a full second slower. What this means is that the knife is no longer a viable attack when face-to-face with an enemy, since the animation it takes for you to take your knife out and swing it is more than enough time for the opponent to move and dodge the swing. In a way, maybe that’s what the developers wanted – knife attacks should only be stealth kills. I won’t make that argument there, but I’ll admit that it sucks if I’m stuck with a sniper rifle and a tracer gun when encountering an opponent in close quarters. That means I’m dead.

I’ll mention one of the minor things that I did really like though that’s new in Bad Company 2: defib kits. The medic has a defibrillator with unlimited use. If you are near a teammate that has died, you can bring him back to life basically immediately, provided it’s within the first few seconds that he’s died. Having a medic hide behind the attacking front line and immediately bringing them back to life as soon as players fall is awesome.

The Bad Company 2 demo is unmistakably good. But so was the first Bad Company. In fact, I almost feel like the sequel is really not much different from the first game at all, and to me that’s a bad thing. I played the sequel and thought to myself, “Yeah, I’ll get this I guess, but it doesn’t really seem to offer much more than the original Bad Company game.” Still, for those of you that feel like returning to the destructibility and vehicles of the Bad Company universe, the demo shows that it’s going to deliver more of the same. Unfortunately for me, I also feel like my time is not quite over yet with Modern Warfare 2, so Bad Company 2 might have to wait.

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