Battlefield: Bad Company (online multiplayer)

Having reached rank five on the online multiplayer for BF: Bad Company, I think I'm ready to give some details. The multiplayer is pretty addictive if I'm honest. Which means its good.

You work in teams to carry out certain objectives, and at the moment there are 2 game modes. Although more modes will probably be released in the future. These game modes are 'Gold Rush' and 'Conquest'. The objective of 'Gold Rush' is to successfully attack or defend a certain number of gold crates on a map, whereas in 'Conquest' the teams have to try and make each other's reinforcements deplete fastest. This is done either by killing the enemy, or controlling more command posts than the enemy.



The 'Conquest' mode was released on 07/08/08, and is available to download for free off xbox live.

I mainly played the 'Conquest' mode, because I was familiar with it. It was a very popular game mode in previous Battlefield games, but I knew it from Star Wars: Battlefront.

You get to choose from 5 different soldier classes; Assault, Recon, Specialist, Demolition and Support. Each class has its own benefits, and different roles in the game. Support for instance can heal squadmates or repair vehicles, whilst Recon will provide sniper fire, and deploy motion sensors telling the squad where the enemy is.

Each soldier class starts off with a basic weapon, and a couple of other items. They can however unlock extra items to give them the advantage, such as health injectors (assault) and laser designators (Recon). There are also 2 extra guns that can be unlocked for each class, which are generally better than the starting weapon. The player can unlock these items by using credits which are acquired from ranking up. This means that you are likely to focus on optimizing one class before moving on to the others.

Once class, weapon and spawn point have been decided, the player may enter the battle. The players then earn points which go towards ranking up based on what they do. A kill for instance will get 10 points, and then another few points for how the kill was achieved, e.g. Headshot + 5 points. You can also get points for destroying vehicles, assisting squadmates and capturing command posts etc. I was managing to get about 150 points a match on 'Conquest', although other players were getting 300+. You then rank up when you reach a certain points total.

There are many unlockable awards which you can get for doing certain things in the game, and dog tags which are claimed when you knife a player.

The maps are well designed and fun to play on, the graphics are again superb and lag is minimal. I managed to play many matches before realising that I had spent about 3 hours on it, which I think is a testament to how fun it is. Gameplay is much like the singleplayer experience - although maybe a little more hectic, but you are given the sandbox environment to play around with too which is great. Vehicles are aplenty, although grabbing a helicopter isn't so easy because everyone wants it. The first and only time I got one so far, I managed to fly into the sea whilst persuing an enemy boat - not a great tactical maneuver.

All in all, it is a great experience. Giving something different to my other online shooters. Multiplayer is very well rounded, although a few more game modes might help and it has no split screen option, so you won't be able to do 2 players on the same console.