As a long-time fan of the first-person shooter genre, the Battlefield series holds a special place in my heart. Whether in the deserts of 1942’s Gazala, or the jungles of Vietnam’s Operation Hastings, I’ve spent a considerable portion of my gaming life in DICE’s shooters. My disappointment at the first Bad Company’s console-only release was relieved when it was announced that the follow-up would be coming to the PC as well.

I, like so many of you, spent a ton of time in the multiplayer beta. The game showed a lot of promise, but there were some issues. So, come launch day, I was eager to get into the game and see how the retail release shook out.

Like the first game, Bad Company 2 offers both a singleplayer campaign and several multiplayer game modes. Prior to the Bad Company series, Battlefield games really had no singleplayer component, outside of playing multiplayer maps against computer controlled bots. Bad Company reverses this trend, and the sequel’s singleplayer component is excellent.

The campaign pits the four soldiers of Bad Company against a nebulous threat, and sends them around the world looking for a brand new weapon of mass destruction. If you jump right into the singleplayer game, you’ll be blown away by the detailed environments made possible by the Frostbite engine. Static backdrops are combined with amazingly rendered game objects to give the setting an almost never-before-seen level of depth.

Once the firefights break out, you get to see the other impressive part of the Frostbite engine: the fully destructible environments. Lob a grenade against a wooden fence, and only a few splinters will survive the resulting explosion. Grab an RPG and blow out the side of a building for a satisfying, creaking and groaning building collapse.

Another thing that stands out about the singleplayer is that the squad AI is actually pretty intelligent. Your squad will suppress as you flank, cover you while you reload, and even use cover intelligently themselves. There are still a few glitches, such as squadmates hanging far back as you advance to contact, but these moments are few and far between.

The campaign is short (around four and a half hours), but let’s be honest: We weren’t looking forward to the campaign mode, so it feels like a nice bonus that comes along with what we really want: the multiplayer action.

Multiplayer has been the heart of the Battlefield series since its inception, and Bad Company 2 delivers in spades. Classic Battlefield game modes like Conquest and Deathmatch are combined with Bad Company’s Rush mode to deliver a wide array of game choices.

Whichever mode you choose, be prepared for a whole new level of strategy in this Battlefield title. The series has always focused on rewarding players for playing as a team, and Bad Company 2 maintains that tradition. What takes this title to the next level is the amount of damage you can inflict on the world around you.

Destructible environments mean that if your target is hiding behind a fence, you can simply shoot right through. Heck, you can even drop a building on an opposing sniper if you can’t get a bead on his location. If you can’t get around a building to the door, a well-placed C4 explosive can make a brand-new door in any wall you wish.

Another feature that is very welcome is the squad system. Born in Battlefield 2, the squad system allows players to spawn on any living squad mate. This means that if just one person survives that charge into the enemy base and finds cover, you can have a full squad there in just a few seconds. Healing, assisting, or providing ammo to your squadmates results earns you extra points, so being in a coherent squad is a boon to those of you interested in working up the tiered system of unlockable goodies.

The unlock system is based on experience points. Everything you do on the battlefield can earn you points, and working with your squad can increase the points you gain. There are overall unlocks, such as the Thompson submachine gun or the M1911 .45 caliber pistol, and there is a progression of unlocks for each class. There’s even a vehicle specific unlock path.

While the unlocked weapons don’t have the superiority over the starting ones that was present in Battlefield 2, they do offer choices. All about accuracy? There’s a gun for that. Would you rather have a massive rate of fire to put more lead downrange fast? You’re covered there too. There are also unlocks that improve movement speed, let you carry more ammo, and more.

PC gamers were in an uproar when it was announced that Modern Warfare 2 would not have dedicated servers for PC players, and a good number of them refused to purchase it for that reason. True to their roots, DICE has incorporated dedicated server support into Bad Company 2, and the game is improved by it. There have been some server issues due to load (a DICE representative was quoted as saying that peak load for this title is over 400% higher than any other Battlefield game), so much so that DICE has suspended the creation of new servers until they are sure they can handle the load they create.

As with any PC game, there have been some hiccups. In addition to master server load issues, there have been some players receiving PunkBuster errors and some strange crashes, but DICE has already released patches to address these issues, and the vast majority of the time, the game runs like a dream.

I had the opportunity to play the PS3 version of Bad Company 2 as well, and although the game is still fun on PS3, I highly recommend that you spring for the PC version if you have the rig to run it. Frostbite can be resource intensive, but my testing rig (Intel Core 2 Duo 3.16Ghz, 4GB DDR21066, GeForce GTX 260) had no issues running the game at 1920×1200 with all graphics at their highest settings.

EA sent out an email around release time for Bad Company 2 calling it “The Ultimate Modern Warfare experience.” I don’t know how intentional that subject line was, but there’s no question that Bad Company 2’s multiplayer has raised the expectation bar awfully high for the genre.

Conclusions

As a singleplayer shooter, Bad Company 2 is good but short. If that’s what you’re looking for, you could come away from this game a little disappointed. But if you’re a long-time Battlefield fan like me, a Modern Warfare 2 holdout who wants dedicated servers, or just someone who thinks the idea of collapsing a building on your adversary sounds cool, you can’t go wrong with Bad Company 2.

Gaming Today rates Battlefield: Bad Company 2 a 9.5.