Scheduled to drop late this summer, EA is currently running a 360-exclusive multiplayer beta of the next iteration of the Battlefield franchise, subtitled Bad Company. After taking the series into a more futuristic direction with Battlefield 2142 on the PC and the lackluster 360 debut of the series, Battlefield 2: Modern Combat, it seems DICE and EA are set to return to a formula similar to the series' high watermark, Battlefield 2. Although the finished product will feature a complete single player campaign, hopefully much better than that of Modern Combat, the beta focuses exclusively on the multiplayer aspect of the game.

The first thing you will notice about the Bad Company beta is that it is very much a beta. Unlike other recent betas the 360 has seen which served mostly as hype machines for an almost finished product, the Bad Company beta has it's share of glitches and bugs you may experience. You can't really say this is a negative as the purpose of a beta is to discover and flesh out such glitches, so there's no point harping too much on it. That said, I am a bit worried for Bad Company because of some of its shortcomings of the beta, first and foremost being the lack of a party system or even the ability to invite friends to a match, whether ranked or unranked. While this may not be indicative of the final product, it's really all we have to go on about the multiplayer aspect of Bad Company and honestly if EA was planning to implement a party system in the final game, they should have considered putting it in the beta as well. At the time of writing, it has also been very difficult to get a game of Bad Company going. This may just be a result of a higher than expected initial number of people playing or something else, but on the plus side, there is very little lag if any, once you are playing.

That's not to say the Bad Company beta is all bad. It is still very much a Battlefield game and fans of the series who were underwhelmed by it's first outing on the 360, should be put at ease to hear that Bad Company plays much more like the original Battlefield 2 that we all know and love. For the most part, the feel and controls of the game are much the same as Battlefield 2. It does seem, however that Bad Company is geared more toward the run and gun console crowd though with much less penalty when aiming and moving at the same time compared to BF2. It's about the same as Call of Duty 4 in that respect.

 

The big new feature of Bad Company is of course the destructible environments, a feature which I am pleased to say makes for more dynamic gameplay and adds a new level of strategy to the FPS genre. In previous Battlefield games, one of my biggest gripes has always been the ease with which a vehicle like a tank can be brought down. If you were controlling a tank, unless you were particularly adept at angling your shots to hit infantry with splash damage, a soldier with a LAW or grenade launcher could easily win a battle with a tank if they hid around a corner. It was a result of the tank shell stopping dead once it hit a wall and prevented a soldier on the other side of the wall from being hurt. Now however, in a much more realistic way, the tank can just fire at the wall and completely obliterate it, leaving the soldier with no cover. An even better use of the environment destruction, however, is the ability to literally create your own pathway to an objective through buildings and other obstacles. It can greatly reduce the defending teams' ability to camp the same two or three entrances to an objective and make for a more varied and intense matches. While it's not quite as revolutionary as the perks of Call of Duty 4, but it's on the same wave length which speaks volumes of where DICE is aiming with Bad Company.

 

At the same time, there are some nagging albeit minor complaints to be levied against Bad Company, some of which are simple omissions that certainly would be nice to see integrated into the final product while others are just simply bad judgment calls. For instance, the lack of rumble when getting shot seems like a little thing, but after so many other games have done it, it's really quite jarring to get shot and not feel that little jolt. Another slight annoyance is that when taking out your knife to stab someone, you will have to then manually switch back to your weapon. Amazing how such a slight and seemingly insignificant thing could matter so much, but for a rabid Call of Duty 4 player, this could be the difference between a 10 kill streak and a 2 kill streak and for DICE and EA, the difference between converting that player to Battlefield, and not.

 

In the end, Bad Company shows a big progression for the series from the lackluster Modern Combat port the 360 received 2 years ago, but still shows room for improvement. It plays up most of the things we loved originally about Battlefield 2 and injects some new ideas to prevent the game from feeling like a complete rehash. Whether that will be enough for Bad Company to interject itself into the holy war being wagged on the 360 between the Call of Duty 4 faithful and the Halo 3 zealots, only time will tell. One thing is almost for certain though; it stands a much better chance if the final product features full matchmaking and some slight tweaks to gameplay. Do something different from Call of Duty 4, yes, but doing something different in a counter-intuitive way defeats the purpose.