threevue

EA’s Battlefield: Bad Company drops next week, but we tried our hands at the demo and this is what we think so far:

Mark:
This game is the reason I haven’t posted in the past 36+ hours, I can’t put it down. I came home after work last night looking forward to playing it, only to find out that they reset the servers every night, which puts the kaibosh on the multiplayer.

Speaking of the multiplayer, that’s the only thing I’ve been playing. All I wanted from this game was for it to be a now-gen BF2:MC, which so far, it is very close to being. I breezed through the single player demo once, and left unimpressed. It doesn’t look spetacular, the characters are borderline annoying, and the storyline is just south of being a complete “Three Kings” ripoff, but like I said before, I’m not concerned with that.

I was probably going to buy the game anyways, but this demo confirms that a purchase will be made.

Russ:
Not being one for FPS online multiplayer (it’s not you, it’s me) and having never played any Battlefield game before, I dove right into the single-player demo blind. My initial reaction was, “Hey this looks pretty gritty and real.” I like the speed of the controls, they seem really tight and frantic. I didn’t like that my health bar didn’t automatically regenerate - I guess I’ve been spoiled by the simplicity of modern FPS games. Can you control your teammates? I couldn’t figure out how to give them commands or anything, so we were each doing our own thing.

I’ll tell you right now that I’m not a fan of the vehicles yet. I was so impressed with how tight and fun the FPS part felt, but jumping into a vehicle felt like a step backwards. I don’t like that the left trigger button and bumper controlled the gas and brake, it seemed counterintuitive to me. And the right stick does nothing but control the camera - it’s useless. I know that nobody wants to be faulted for copying Halo; but come on, I like those vehicle controls best and I wouldn’t mind if this game followed suit. Then again, maybe the controls are customize-able, I didn’t check. Overall, I liked the game, and was impressed with it, but I will probably wait until it reaches the $40 mark before I buy it.

Tyler:
I played the demo for about an hour, trying to get familiar with the controls and learn the new features. And here is what I found. I love love love the explosions in the destrucible environments. This alone will make the game that much more replayable in the online arena. I also like the aesthetic, sort of Call of Duty, sort of Red Dawn. I like the graphics for what they are… not jaw-dropping or bar-raising but definitely not too shabby. I like being back in vehicles and laying C4 again.

I don’t like Sarge because he is unoriginal and has awful voice acting; he never raises his voice above a mild suggestive tone, not even during battles. I don’t like the smart-Ass-New-Yorker who convieniently knows all about the secret brotherhood of goldbrick-carrying mercenaries.  I don’t like the control layout (do they not understand that 80% of the people who will play this are coming straight from COD4 and will have to go through the frustration of relearning this ass-backwards control scheme? Make it customizeable). I don’t like the feel of the controls, they seem too blocky and robotic. There doesn’t seem to be any give when you move, like you are locked on to a grid.

I have to check out the multiplayer to really get an idea of this game though. For the moment, I guess the name of this game described the demo pretty well… BAD company.