Battlefield: Bad Company is different. It actually has a single player campaign. Complete with story-line. Shock and horror. Someone grab me a defibrillator and a block of Couronne Lochoise cheese, for I have just fallen off my chair.

    You take on the persona of Preston Marlowe, another in a long line of main characters with silly names (although, it will take something special to beat Soap McTavish). Anyway, as Preston Marlowe, you have been recently transferred to B Company in a non-descript war against those ever-reliable antagonists, the Russians. You are very quickly introduced to the rest of the squad: Sgt. Redfern, Private Sweetwater and Private Haggard.

    I should explain that B Company (or Bad Company, hence the games name), is where the misfits and rejects of the army are basically sent to die in battle. They are the cannon fodder for the army. For example, it is explained in the opening minutes of the game that Private Sweetwater is in Bad Company for releasing a virus into the army’s computer network. Haggard likes explosions, and his presence in Bad Company had something to do with an ammo dump (you can use your imagination to fill in the rest). Redfern will get some time knocked off his sentence by commanding Bad Company.
    This is what you have to work with.

    So. The story progresses as you would expect, with gunfights against those dastardly Russians taking place in various buildings, bases and golf courses. At the end of the first mission, your squad finds a bar of gold on the body of a recently dispatched mercenary, and from then on, it serves as main drive of the squad: to find the legendary Legionnaire’s Gold. In the process of searching for this gold, Bad Company managed to single handedly invade a country neutral to the conflict between the USA and Russian Federation.
  

    Now that that is out of the way, what you are really here for is a commentary on the multiplayer. Oh, I’m sure you had a fleeting interest in the manifestation of a proper single player campaign, but what you’re really salivating over is the multiplayer functionality, and how it will work with destructible walls

    What? Destructible walls you say?
    If you have been following the development of Bad Company with even the remotest bit of interest (about a sliver above John Howard’s interest in apologizing (zing!)), then you should be aware that Battlefield: Bad Company comes with the ability to blow up walls, and arguably changes the multiplayer dynamics quite drastically. At least, that was the aim. Several hours of playing over X-Box Live have led me to the conclusion that most people just blow up the walls that surround the objectives on each and every map. It is a straight-forward strategy, but it can also become quite annoying, given it gives greater exposure to the enemy whilst completing each objective.

    Before getting right into this, I should explain the multiplayer mode. Yes, that’s right. Mode. Singular. Not plural. Just one mode. “Outrageous. I demand a recount,” I can hear you muttering to yourself with your mouthful of Prattigauer cheese.
    It is true that this iteration of the series shipped with only one multiplayer mode. It is called Gold Rush, and is basically an Attackers vs. Defenders scenario. The Attackers have to destroy two gold crates within a certain number of lives. Once this is achieved, the map expands, and a new base is the target. Reinforcements (i.e. More lives) are awarded each time a base is captured. The Defenders win by exhausting all the Attackers lives. Straight forward.

    Having said all that, due to popular demand during the beta-testing, Conquest will be making a return as additional content for download, although there is no indication of when that will happen.

    As with most Battlefields, the ranking system makes a return, with points awarded for kills, kill assists, completing the objective etc etc etc. It’s all fairly standard in this regard. However, you can also ‘win’ badges and awards for completing different tasks. For example, getting 6 kills with a UMP (that’s a type of gun)…

    Having said all that however, I personally feel that Call of Duty 4 did it so much better. The different objectives in COD 4 feel like a natural result of the game play. Some of the Bad Company awards seem painfully ludicrous (get 20 kills from headshots in one round). Getting one kill from a headshot can be hard enough.

    There are 25 ranks available in multiplayer, with level 25 requiring some 37,000 in game points. Given that 1 kill is worth 10 points, you are going to be playing for a long time to hit level 25.

    As a result of waffling on about the multiplayer, I shall now return to the single player element, as there are some other things that are worth mentioning. The set pieces are your standard schlock. Nothing spectacular there. But what is worth talking about is the dialogue in the in game cut scenes. Yes you heard me. The DIALOGUE. Capitalized. What you need to remember is that Bad Company is made up of the army’s rejects. Not the brightest sparks in the power station. Watching the antics of Sweetwater and Haggard while Sgt Redfern is receiving/issuing new orders is almost worth the price of admission. Never mind Sweetwaters’ obvious crush on the voice over chick, who he calls Miss July. You can pick your own moments of comedy gold, but my personal favourite involves Sweetwater arguing why he shouldn’t have to take orders from Redfern (it happens during the third mission from memory).
  

    But it’s not all swings and roundabouts. The helicopter controls are some of the worst I have seen in a game. Admittedly, all I have to compare them to are the helicopter controls from GTA4, and they were brilliant. There also seems to be a little bit of lag on the servers (or it could just be my rubbish internet connection).   

   My biggest gripe however, is that there is no skill matching, like there is in Halo 3. In one instance, I selected a match that would be Normal (as opposed to Challenging), and proceeded to get thoroughly own3d. Yep, complete with Geek Speak. At least in Halo 3, you were up against people that were around your own rank, which is a facet that would have made the Bad Company multiplayer experience that much more enjoyable.

Although it is fun to go around and knife people in the back…