Battlefield has always been and is the home of multiplayer battles, but I can’t say much about it, especially since I lost my password for an online game in Bad Company 2 many years ago and attempts to recover it were unsuccessful – DICE is merciless when it comes to negligence. I can only say that the Internet shootouts in this part of the series left much more pleasant memories in my soul than the notorious Battlefield 3, which seems to me a sadistic haven for web runners whose cerebellum is directly connected to the PC via a fiber optic cable. In no other online game have I been as disoriented and, at the same time, mercilessly cyber-humiliated as in Battlefield 3, and I had difficulties finding game sessions even in the year of release – the servers were almost empty back then for some reason. But the multiplayer of Bad Company 2 provided the same sensations of a large-scale, but unhurried war, which I hoped to get in the sequel.
But I’m much more interested in the single-player side of Bad Company 2 – what, in a high video game manner, is called a "story campaign". And what can I say, she is amazing. Almost. There are game design problems of the 2000s, but we’ll discuss them.
The most succinct description I can give of the technical side of Bad Company 2 is that if video games had stopped in their development at this point, I would not have been very upset. Yes, the graphics, due to the lack of detail and shaders, give off a slight cartoonish look, but for the most part the game looks great even today. The landscapes are magnificent – rich, bright, vibrant. The first level, not counting the prologue, which takes place in a winter environment, still amazes me with the quality of the picture – how the snow glistens in the midday sun, how enemy silhouettes appear through the frosty haze, how weapons rattle and how the walls of nearby shacks fly apart. Then, of course, you understand that all the destructible houses in the game are literally 4 walls and a roof – there is nothing else there – but who cares, especially for the first time.
Against the backdrop of all this, Modern Warfare 2, which was released only 4 months earlier, with all its scale and entertainment, seems like a toy about plastic soldiers.
I didn’t have a chance to https://crystalrollcasino.co.uk/ play the Vietnam expansion, but I feel like after the prologue, which takes place during World War II, the low-tech setting suits the game even better – it further enhances the authenticity of what is happening, or, if you will, immersiveness. But then it wouldn’t have turned out to be a near-spy action movie about 4 Marines and a leftist pilot, almost single-handedly saving the United States from the threat of using super-weapons from the past.
The script in Bad Company 2 is actually a contradictory thing. On the one hand, he talks about, no less than, a world war initiated by no matter who, but he himself avoids this topic as best he can, giving neither the reasons for the conflict nor the circumstances under which this war takes place. The game sets a conventional setting, gives a name to the enemy side and is limited by that. The key events of the game are very local – as I said, this is, in fact, an ironic spy action movie about a team of jokers, for whom the storm of a total war is more of a reason to remember a movie from the 80s.
In the course of the plot, we will bring down the satellite of the French, “who have everything in their ass,” from orbit, rescue from captivity a triple agent who is taking revenge on America for the cynical waste of his personnel in the recent past, bring the hippie pacifist to the condition of John Rimbaud, and also destroy the mobile doomsday machine of the United States at an altitude of 3 thousand meters. The plot is not a grandiose manuscript, as one might conclude, but it doesn’t need to be – it’s moderately fun, moderately exciting, and seems a little serious. If you call the plot of Bad Company 2 simple-minded irony over harsh Hollywood blockbusters about modern conflicts like "Storm the White House", no one will be upset, I think.
Games are, of course, about gameplay, especially Bad Company 2, so the plot here is just a pleasant addition to the gameplay. It’s pleasant to shoot, the gun in your hands chirps as it should, and the enemies, although armored, can’t withstand more than a couple of bursts at themselves – the feeling of how heavy and deadly your gun is is almost the main thing in shooters, I’m convinced.
The Bad Company 2 campaign has a running time of 4-5 hours and tries to fill this time as best it can – sniper shooting under thunderclaps, a section on a tank, a pseudo open location in the desert with three points of interest, that’s all. And if there’s anything I want to stubbornly find fault with, it’s precisely the desert level. It should have been renamed “Valley of Helicopter Bosses”, there are 3 of them there, and the battle with 2 of them takes place simultaneously. And these are not the good-natured helicopters from GTA 5, where with a well-aimed shot you can kill a machine gunner, or even a pilot, causing the flying machine to go into free fall. Oh no, those are the bastard helicopter bosses from the old games that will come into your house in the middle of the night, pull down your pants and – you get the idea.
The problem is not even that the boss helicopter in the Bad Company 2 edition is impenetrable – it only needs two hits from an RPG. The problem is that the local RPG shoots so accurately that the projectile deviates from the sight by 40 degrees already at the departure stage. And the helicopter boss is not henpecked, he himself doesn’t mind performing an evasive maneuver. I even had a moment when the helicopter boss made a horizontal “strafe”, which is unusual for helicopters at all – as if he was playing Dark Souls with me, or something like that. And the worst thing is that the battle takes place in an open area. And this is disgusting both from the point of view of gameplay and game design as such.
The boss helicopter will not wait for you to get into it – instead, it will open a machine-gun fire at you, from which there is simply nowhere to run, because you are in the open air. This is an ugly choreographed fight simply because you as a player have no way of not absorbing this damage – because in this case you are not ordinary Marlow, you are a game model with a hitbox and you have health points. And you’ll have to absorb machine-gun fire in a continuous stream, because you still can’t hit a helicopter. And you literally run in circles around the plateau available to you, at the same time to pick up RPGs, at the same time to regenerate in the process, so that the number of bullets in your virtual body does not exceed threshold levels. Meanwhile, the helicopter boss isn’t waiting, he’s chasing you, he’s sneaking behind you, peeking over the mountain range.
The only thing worse than this is that after the 1st helicopter boss, the 2nd one immediately follows. And if you have fun with the 1st for too long, then both of you at once. There is also an RPG at the level in limited quantities, but this is already so, subtleties. I categorically do not recommend playing Bad Company 2 on difficulty above “medium” just because of the helicopter bosses. Of the said 5 hours of gameplay, at least 40 minutes were spent fighting these flying death machines. At the end of the game, by the way, there will be another helicopter, and it is also disgusting, because it calls you faster than you call it. But he doesn’t deserve half the attention given to desert bosses.
Perhaps this is all I can tell you about the proposed game. Bad Company 2 is an excellent work, the potential of which is not at all exhausted by its multiplayer beginning. Helicopter bosses are sporadic, and other shortcomings are completely insignificant, and the impression left by the game is no dimmer than in the year of release. That’s why I recommend it.
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