Military Video Games, computer games, games, gaming - Navy Times

Game Review: ‘Battlefield: Bad Company’

There’s a great scene early in “Saving Private Ryan” in which Paul Giamatti sits down on a pile of boards to get a rock out of his boot. In a classic Steven Spielberg twist, Giamatti knocks loose a long board, which collapses the wall of a bombed-out building behind him, revealing a group of German soldiers. After a quick standoff, the American paratroopers liquidate the unlucky squad of Nazis.

I kept thinking of that sequence as I played “Battlefield: Bad Company,” the new first-person shooter in which virtually everything you encounter is destructible. If you suspect there are bad guys in a house up ahead, don’t bother peeking in the windows — you can blow a hole in the wall with a grenade. Your bullets cut down trees. But that works both ways. If you try to hide in a building, the bad guys can bring down the entire structure on top of you.

Destructible environments are just one novel selling point behind the new “Battlefield.” Another is that you can go almost anywhere on the maps and use almost any vehicle, which theoretically sets up an endless variety of ways to complete your objectives. In practice, however, the go-anywhere, drive-anything experience isn’t fully realized and doesn’t make the new “Battlefield” quite a revolutionary game experience, just an interesting new twist on the old shooter formula.

In theory, the wide-open maps in “Battlefield” should make the game about tactics, i.e., how to use geography and surprise to assault a position with an inferior force. But the game won’t let you stray too far outside where it thinks you ought to be, locking you into de rigueur, guns-blazing frontal assaults. You also can’t pick off bad guys piecemeal as you advance.

But if the gameplay dynamics don’t make “Battlefield’s” single-player mode a stunner, the graphics do. The environments are bathed in wonderfully naturalistic light, the vehicles look and move just like their real-life versions and the sound design is amazing — listen to the shell casings clink as they hit the ground when you fire the .50-caliber machine gun.

The plot for “Bad Company” is purloined straight from the movie “Three Kings” — or, if you prefer, “Kelly’s Heroes” — a squad of American soldiers, mopping up after a war in Russia, discover the mercenaries they’ve been fighting are paid in gold. Gold, I tells ya! Never mind that any paymaster would quit before setting up a distribution system for solid gold bars in a combat zone. The front is lousy with gold, and our heroes, sick of being relegated to their screw-up unit, the eponymous “Bad Company,” resolve that they’re going to get paid.

So with the limited mobility and the unoriginal storyline, “Battlefield’s” campaign mode will yield a few hours’ worth of pleasant diversion.

As with most of today’s games, the area in which “Battlefield” shows the most potential is its multiplayer mode, which still doesn’t exactly give you wide-open maps, but does have big sandboxes packed with weapons, destructible structures and fun vehicles, including boats, helicopters, Humvees, armored personnel carriers and full-sized tanks.

I tested out the multiplayer boards on an advance copy of the game sent to Military Times before the final version hit the streets, so there were only two or three people on the servers, but judging from the first-person and vehicle gameplay, the online version of “Battlefield” could become very dangerous to gamers’ free time.

Like the campaign mode, the main multiplayer mode is gold-oriented, splitting players into teams that must seize gold crates and teams that must defend them. With a little online coordination, these games have the potential for some serious fun: If everybody played along, you could have huge combined-arms assaults on defenders’ gold with tanks, APCs, helicopter air cover and even field artillery.

More realistically, the multiplayer boards will probably be total chaos. But who cares? You can blow up anything you can see.

Game Review