Battlefield Bad Company 2
Battlefield Bad Company 2 is widely seen as one of the best games in the long running
series from DICE and EA, and, like many people, I remember spending hundreds of hours playing
match after match late into the night on popular maps like Arctic Harbor and Heavy Metal, but
since you can still buy the game on Steam, I wanted to go back and revisit the whole
experience objectively, to see if it’s still worth buying and playing today.
There’s no shortage of options out there to anyone looking for a dose of that classic
Battlefield experience.
Games like Battlefield 2 and 2142, and even Battlefield 1942 all still have active multiplayer
scenes thanks to the fan made revival projects like BF2hub, but Bad Company 2 stands out
as a truly unique game to go back and play, not just because the physics, graphics and
weapon handling still look and feel good even by today’s standards, but also because it
was the first Battlefield game that used the brand new Frostbite engine on PC.
Frostbite made it possible to do away with the old static maps from earlier games that
were immune to all forms of damage, and introduced atmospheric environments filled with destructible
buildings and ground deformation that completely changed the way we’d always played and forced
us to stay on our toes, since you couldn’t rely on hiding behind a tiny little wooden
table or even cowering inside a building to shield you from that incoming tank shell or
rocket.
But, nostalgia and fond memories aside, the question we’re trying to answer here is
whether or not it’s still any good today.
Well after playing it intensively over the last few days and analysing it completely
objectively, devoid of all previous attachments to it, the results are abit of a mixed bag.
The biggest concern for us was whether or not anyone still plays it online, and the
answer is yes they do, and since they’re still supported by EA, you don’t need any
3rd party programs to make it work.
You just log in, browse the server list and voila, you’ll be in a match in no time.
Player counts varied based on the time of day, but I never saw less than 100 players
online spread out between 3 or 4 servers, with each server supporting a max of 32 players.
The next obvious concern were the graphics, and keep in mind this is a game that came
out over 10 years ago in 2010, so there’s no point comparing it to modern games like
BF4 or 2042, but honestly it still looks pretty good and it’s got native support for modern
resolutions, with up refresh rates up to 144hz without needing to mess around modifying ini
files to get everything looking like it should.
The maps feel atmospheric with wind blowing dusty clouds around, and rubble flying all
over the place during a match, and honestly if this was a brand new indie game developed
by a small team that just came out today, I think it would be praised for the community
for looking pretty decent, and even if you’re used to the shinier, more modern visuals from
the later games, it won’t take you long to adjust to the slight downgrade in graphics,
and it basically just looks like Battlefield 4 with medium to low graphics settings.
The Weapon handling and rag doll physics were always one of the biggest selling points to
the game, and that’s not changed at all with the passage of time.
If you’re like me and you enjoy abit of solidity, abit of weight and heaviness to
your weapons, with aggressive but predictable recoil and the feeling that the enemy you’re
shooting actually has some meat on his bones, then, at least as far as the Battlefield games
go, Bad Company 2 is still the king, and if they were to re-release Battlefield 4 with
Bad Company 2’s physics, you’d have one of the best FPS games in history, which is
just another way of saying that the game still feels very tactile rewarding to play.
Like in most Battlefields, there’s 4 different classes to play as including medic, recon,
assault and engineer, each with their own unique line up of weapons that can only be
used by that class, and you can do some light customization too by switching out a weapon’s
mods and attachments to meet the needs of any given scenario.
It’s not all good news though, and old father time hasn’t been as forgiving to some aspects
of the game he has to others…
As with most Battlefield games, the single player campaign is mostly a bland, mundane
experience that involves some uninteresting storyline with overly dramatic cut scenes,
followed by a bit of a gun fight with some half competent training dummies known as AI,
then you do abit of running around and then rinse and repeat until you complete the story.
To this date, none of the Battlefield campaigns have managed to capture my imagination, and
I never recommend buying them for the singleplayer experience, which is a shame since some of
EA’s other games have some really compelling campaigns, like Titanfall 2, but either way,
if you ask me, the campaign in Bad Company 2 isn’t really worth a look.
The
sound effects stood out as being really, really terrible, and even so much as listening for
foot steps as someone sprints up towards me was barely audible and inconsistent, but at
the same time as not being able to hear a guy jumping around 10 meters behind me, the
sound of an incoming enemy tank on the other side of the map was almost deafening.
Not even the war tapes setting could make the audio any more reliable, and it made me
realise just how far sound design has come in the last 10 years, and it’s easy to overlook
just how much we rely on good sound design to stay orientated and keep up our spacial
awareness, and although the sound in Bad Company 2 is admissible, it was definitely the hardest
thing to adjust to as I had to go back to relying more on sight than sound when navigating
around the map.
Another glaring issue to consider is the net code which, to be fair, wasn’t all that
great even when the game was brand new, but now it’s pretty obvious that there’s a
bit of built-in de-sync going on that leads to other players doing jerky movements and
there’s a tiny bit of rubber banding when a tank crashes through a nearby fence.
Camping and unbalanced teams is also a major issue, and there were many occasions where
a match would be deadlocked for ages as one side tried endlessly to plant the explosives
in Rush with only a couple of angles to attack from, and would just end up getting camped
for the entirety of the match.
Playing this again also reminded me how annoying snipers can be, since the idea of adding a
glare to the sniper’s scope to illuminate their position to the whole map hadn't been
invented yet.
Anyway while it’s already glaring obvious that there’s no way I’m gonna get this
review down to 3 minutes, overall whether or not Bad Company 2 is worth it comes down
to what you’re looking for.
If you’re out chasing a feeling of nostalgia from a by gone era and you’re wondering
whether or not it’s still enjoyable today, then the answer is a definite yes.
It feels and looks just as good as it did when it came out, and it works really well
on modern operating systems without doing any additional troubleshooting, and since
the online community is still alive, albeit on life support, it’s still perfectly playable
and despite all its shortcomings, it’s still really fun.
If on the other hand you’re new to the Battlefield series and wondering if Bad Company 2 is a
good place to start, or you started playing the Battlefield games long after Bad Company
2 was released, then I honestly don’t see any reason to start playing it as a brand
new player today, as it just makes way more sense to play something like BF4, 1 and V
instead which are more in-line with the new direction that Battlefield’s taken over
the years, and unlike Bad Company 2, I reckon they still have a good few years ahead of
them.
Screenshot
Minimum: System Requirements
- CPU: Core 2 Duo @ 2.0GHz
- CPU SPEED: Info
- RAM: 2GB
- OS: Windows XP
- VIDEO CARD: 256 MB Video Card (GeForce 7800 GT / ATI X1900)
- PIXEL SHADER: 3.0
- VERTEX SHADER: 3.0
- DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 256 MB
Recommended: System Requirements
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad or higher
- CPU SPEED: Info
- RAM: 2GB
- OS: Windows Vista or Windows 7
- VIDEO CARD: 512 MB Video Card (GeForce GTX 260/ ATI Radeon 4870)
- PIXEL SHADER: 4.0
- VERTEX SHADER: 4.0
- DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 512 MB
Battlefield Bad Company 2 Game Installation Instructions
- Download game archive from download link given below.
- Right click on the downloaded files and click on file(Part 01)“Extract here”.
- You need WinRAR installed to do it.
- Once extracted, Open the folder named(Battlefield Bad Company 2 By SK Gaming Point).
- Click on setup and “Run as Administrator”.
- Click on next, next, next Browse where you want to install the game click on next, next and finish.
- Right click on the game icon .exe and then click on “Run as Administrator” to start the game.
- Enjoy 🙂
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