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| You should still buy it by Fortinbras 03/14/2010, 11:48am PDT | ||||
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| Bad Company 2 is Battlefield 2.1, with a single-player intro tacked onto it.
My favorite map in BF2142 was Cerbere Landing. Just a crazy, brutal house-to-house fight with shells raining down around your ears whenever the commander called in orbital artillery. A lot of maps in Bad Company 2 have that same feeling, with the other half or so feeling like Battlefield Vietnam or Desert Warfare. At first I thought I'd really hate the player cap, I know for sure I would have never enjoyed Bad Company 1 with 24 player max, but 32 just seems to be the sweet spot. One thing that always kept me from enjoying Battlefield to its max was the long hikes you could have to the front line, even if you had a nearby point you had captured. The learning curve could be pretty unforgiving. This was improved upon in Battlefield 2/2142 when they introduced the squad leader reinforcement pod, which allowed you to respawn via drop-pod right next to your squad leader, and allowed you to spawn in dropships. Bad Company 2 takes this a step further and now allows you to spawn on ANYONE in your squad. This produces a huge incentive to squad up, and I honestly think having the checkbox for "YES, PUT ME IN A SQUAD" is redundant thanks to that. Battles, especially on Rush are always fast paced and there's always a firefight, there's no downtime waiting for some random schmuck to try and show up and stealth-cap your point. The introduction of the combat knife to the middle mouse button instead of having to switch to it is a feature that warrants so much praise and respect that there isn't enough room on this page for it. Vehicles are pretty heavily rationed, you'll get maybe 2 tanks and a helicopter on a really big map, and maybe one IFV per side on smaller ones. Though it also seems like it takes a lot of AT rounds to take them out, and a couple of engineers hopping out and using power tools on its backside can just turn it into a fucking juggernaut. P.S. Drivers: If you see your health going UP, will you STOP so I don't have to CHASE AFTER YOUR ASS with a power drill?! The Destruction 2.0 thing of course is the big sell, and almost all the classes have a way to blow shit up, with the exception of the Medic. Jeez, would it have been that hard to allow the Medic to swap his medkit or shock-pads for C4? I guess so! Last night I had a moment that really stands out in my mind when I was playing Recon and I was getting irritated with the shitload of trees blocking my view in the last stage of Valparaso. FUCK YOU TREES! One mortar strike later and I had a perfectly designed killzone all set up. Fussbett's gripe about most of the maps being way too linear is accurate, but once you do a little remodeling of the level through mass destruction it can clear that up and give you a few more options. In fact, you kind of have to unlearn your standard FPS behavior to STOP firing once a guy ducks behind a wall. Instead you say FUCK THAT and aim a 40mm grenade launcher at his piece of cover, blowing it away and taking him out with it. My only real gripes with the game aren't so much the gameplay but just stupid player behavior and stupid choices in class design. Forcing the Medic to grind 1000-2000 points for his medkit is absurd. Why anyone would intentionally pick a gimped Assault class instead of going full Assault is beyond me! Team-stacking occurs a lot when it's clear one side is getting rolled, and no servers seem to carry scripts to prevent it. HEY DICE MAYBE YOU SHOULD HAVE PUT A TEAM BALANCING OPTION IN THOSE SERVER SWITCHES? Similarly, turning off Friendly Fire was a long time coming, and don't you dare turn it back off, since there's ZERO incentive not to teamkill. One guy flipped his keyboard so hard at what he viewed as spawn camping he switched teams and did nothing but teamkill for 45 minutes. The only penalty is losing -15 points, which, considering you win 200 points simply for winning the round seems a lame-ass way to try and discourage griefing. Then of course there are the gripes about the server browser, the way I have to keep adding Entropy Stew to my friends list each night because the game EATS MY FRIENDS LIST, and the way some servers just leave you with a PLEASE WAIT.... loading message and then nothing. But these are all just minute details that could be fixed with a 1.1 patch and don't really kill the enjoyment of the game. What I really think has come out in Bad Company 2 is a Battlefield title that has stripped away a lot of the headaches and high learning curve of a regular BF game, and left you with a fairly streamlined if a bit paired down product that serves as a great lead-in for moving on to Battlefield 3 (whenever it comes out). The kind of design decisions on display here are the same that TF2 made in creating a more enjoyable game and removing shit that just didn't work but the genre took for granted. |
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