I Think I Know Why It’s Called Bad Company

After playing through the frustrating finale of Battlefield: Bad Company yesterday I was left wondering what about it I found so terrible. The writing was pretty hilarious and the story was a very refreshing twist on the tired war shooter genre we’ve all played so much of. In fact that is the only reason I played the game in the first place. Squash insisted I give it a go despite me calling the demo a bad Call of Duty clone because he found it so funny. So here we are almost a year later, turns out we were both right, though I like to think I was more right.


I’ve decided the problem with Bad Company is its enemy AI is way to perfect; yet you are given a couple tools that still make the game fairly easy. Just about every encounter starts with you far away from the enemy. You get to make the first move, but for some reason no matter what move it is you choose to make you will still be targeted by every single enemy that has a line of sight to you. They are also all perfect shots, and you pretty much can’t see, much less aim while getting shot at. Later in the game they add giant mortar explosions to the mix in case you got too comfortable just being shot all the time.

The reason you don’t die immediately after trying anything in Bad Company is because one of those miracle tools I mentioned. You have a syringe that gives you full health whenever you use it. It can be used indefinitely, but there is a short cooldown after each use. This results in a pretty standard encounter opening of running around like a maniac stabbing yourself in the chest wildly and as often as you can while trying to find some safe cover. Once you find cover you’ll want to pop out and try to locate a nearby guy, you’ll most likely lose a large chunk of health in the process, but you can always just shoot up again. Once you have the guy in your sights, you can pop in an out of cover firing in his general direction until the red dot on your radar disappears. That means he’s dead! Repeat this for all the red dots and you’ll be rewarded with another area full of red dots.

The other god sent tool the game gives you is a Bioshock-esque death system. Instead of restarting from a set checkpoint upon death you simply respawn at a certain spot with all your progress still in tact. This allows you to potentially run at a tank, shoot a single rocket at it while dying three times in a row and still win the battle. For some reason it didn’t bother me in Bioshock, but in this game I feel like it is only there, along with the miracle needle, to compensate to horrible enemy AI. It’s like the designers realized how unfair their game was, but instead of fixing it they just gave the player infinite health and no real penalty for death. One could argue that by adding those they did fix the game, but that still doesn’t make it enjoyable.

I am probably being overly harsh (and I didn’t even mention the vehicles), but this issue is the main thing that comes to mind when thinking about this game. Probably in large part due to the last couple hours emphasizing just how bad of a problem it is. Still, the game is amusing, it has its fair share of funny jokes, nice destructible environments and a solid soundtrack, but if you are going to play a war shooter there are better ones out there.