Battlefield: Bad Company is EA DICE's second attempt at transitioning the previously PC-centric franchise to a generation of consoles that are already filled to the brim with shooters of every shape, size and variety. While the game boasts a number of great qualities that set it apart from its competition, it's also dragged down by the weight of the things that could have done better.

The game's story follows the exploits of four members of a titular army unit called Bad Company, who are consistently put in harm's way to soften up the enemy before the calvary arrives. In the eyes of the military, they are essentially cannon fodder delegated to the most dangerous missions one could imagine. The player takes the role of Preston Marlowe, a Private recently given the choice between prison for an unnamed crime, or a stint in a Bad Company squad. You can guess which option he chooses. While the Preston character is rather bland at times, serving as little more than a narrative voice, your other squad mates are the driving force of the narrative.

The game does an excellent job portraying a war torn environment.

The plot, which revolves around a war and a connected hunt for mercenary gold in a fictional Russian-speaking country, is a little weak, but the personalities that permeate the experience are where the fun comes from. Shunning any seriousness, the game takes a light-hearted tone, characterized best by the men of your squad. Sweetwater is an educated guy, who also happens to be a coward. Haggard joined the army for the good old fashioned purpose of blowing things up, and Redford is a leader who is very much aware of the fact that the men who follow him are complete idiots. The dialogue is some of the most entertaining you'll find in recent years, and you'll more than once find yourself laughing aloud at the antics of these men. Haggard in particular is rather funny, and listening to him talk about things like Truckasaurus and dating his cousin will always evoke a chuckle in the least.

For a console shooter, Bad Company plays smoothly. The game is incredibly easy to pick up for veterans of the genre, and while it suffers from some of the control problems that often arise in console based shooters (auto-aim, imprecision), they tend to be minimal when compared to other games. Running, jumping and above all, shooting are all rather painless affairs in Bad Company. Throughout the game, you can find and use a number of vehicles ranging from simple humvees to attack helicopters. For the most part, the vehicle controls are solid, feeling very much like Grand Theft Auto in a way. You rarely find yourself questioning what button does what, and while the helicopter controls can be a bit tricky at first, the vehicles are relatively simple to utilize.

The star of the show, however, is easily the destructible environments that permeate the environment. One of the first things most players are likely to do in the single player campaign is to find a wall and blow a hole in it. It is ceaselessly fun to mess around with this mechanic, and to some extent, it really does revolutionize the way you play the game. If an enemy darts into a room for cover, you don't have to follow through the door and into the obvious hail of gunfire that awaits. You can make your own entrance if you want. Players are likely in for some shellshock at first though. Many of the instincts you've developed over the years can be hard to shake, and it's a bit startling the first time you flee into a building, believe yourself to be safe, and then suddenly have a section of the wall explode next to you, leaving you wide open to the enemy. There are limitations though; while most surfaces can be blown up, a few can't, and it takes a little experimentation before you know the ins and outs of this mechanic. Furthermore, while explosives work well enough at reshaping the world around you, bullets follow much the same rules that have governed shooters since their inception. Hiding behind even a flimsy wooden fence will render you safe from gunfire.

Destruction aside, the single player campaign is very much a letdown. You have objectives and a story guiding you, but the entire campaign seems to have been fashioned around the mechanics of the multiplayer mode. When you are killed you don't have to reload a saved game, you simply respawn without any progress lost. Resurrection points, coupled with an almost limitless healing item, make the single player mode ridiculously easy to finish. There is no need for strategy or finesse, you can simply charge in guns blazing without consequence. If you're gunned down, no worries, you can just try again minus whatever baddies you may have killed previously. Making this more into a tedious chore is the fact that the missions lack any real variety. They are all primarily about traveling to different points on the map and killing everything that moves.

Worsening this is the fact that AI tends to be both unfairly lethal and painfully stupid. The game almost punishes you for trying to be stealthy. No matter how silent you are or how sneaky you try to be, the enemy soldiers always seem to know you're around before you've even seen them. They also possess an uncanny ability to focus all of their firepower very accurately on you at all times. It often feels as though you're running around with a bullseye plastered on your head. On the flipside, enemy soldiers will often stand in the open and reload while you're shooting at them. In general, they tend to act as little more than semi-mobile gun turrets. They stand there and shoot until you kill them, and that's about it. The single player mode as a whole just feels like something the developers tacked on because they felt it necessary.

Where Bad Company truly shines is in its multiplayer mode. Sporting twenty-four person online battles, Bad Company features some of the most frantic and exciting matches you'll find in a modern day shooter. Everything that makes the game good, its controls, its vehicles and above all, its destructible environments come together to form an addictive and balanced online component. The vehicles and gun turrets that fill each map provide a fun alternative to players that struggle with the pure shooter action, and the various classes you choose from allow for a fair amount of diversity in gameplay. Bad Company also employs something of an experience system, allowing the player to use points from accumulated medals and rewards to unlock extra weapons. In addition, by scoring more kills, you stand to increase in rank as well. Where the single player campaign can be dull after awhile, the multiplayer mode stays entertaining long after the first few matches. It does a great job of making you feel like you really are in an actual warzone. After the first few minutes of almost any game, much of the environment will be left in ruins.

Bad Company's multiplayer component isn't perfect though, as it sorely lacks variety. The game only ships with a one multiplayer mode, called Gold Rush. Put shortly, it pits two teams against each other as one side tries to defend a treasure trove of gold bars and the other side tries to capture it. This mode is fun, but for any modern shooter to ship with such limited online options is unfortunate. The game doesn't even include a number of the generic deathmatch modes players have come to expect. A second online mode, Conquest, is promised as a future download, but it seems a little lazy of the developers not to include it in the first place. Bad Company's multiplayer is fun, but it could have offered a little more bang for your buck, especially considering the myriad other shooters one could choose from this generation.

Things blow up real well in Bad Company.

Visually, Bad Company is a solid game. It features all the polish players have come to expect. The basic things like textures and character models are all attractive to look at. The game in particular does an excellent job of making the destruction look good. Explosions are bright and flashy while smoke and debris is prevalent everywhere. When things get really heated, it often looks as though the world is coming down around you, and it all looks great when it does. On the other hand, the ground textures are a bit bland and the trees and vegetation tend to look a bit cardboard at times. Compared to what the game does well, however, these tend to be minor complaints.

The sound in Bad Company is one of its finer qualities. The game does a great job of capturing the sheer visceral qualities of war. The weapon fire in particular is very good; machine guns rattle off like staccato thunder and bullets whistle menacingly past the player. Explosions sound very realistic, especially when they're pounding away in the distance. The dialogue, be it the script of the single player campaign, or simply the battle chatter that permeates the multiplayer is all well-acted. The score can be a bit forgettable at times, but it does the job of combining the dramatic tones one would expect from a military shooter with an almost Beach Boys lightheartedness. This is especially reflected well during radio broadcasts in vehicles and the music in the main menu.

In the end, Battlefield: Bad Company is by no means a bad first-person shooter, but it's also far from the best. It's a shame that the game has so many excellent parts that are lessened by what the developers didn't do. Better level design in the single player game and more multiplayer options could have rendered Bad Company a must buy. Unfortunately, as it is, it's more likely to get lost in the sea of shooters that already line the shelves.