The last first person shooter I played was Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64. It displayed these breathtaking 1997 graphics.

Nearly 14 years later I decided to give the genre another try. I brought no preconceptions to the table except the romanticized view of my childhood devotion to Goldeneye. I purchased Bad Company 2 on Steam and installed on my multicore, dual Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 Windows 7 machine without a problem.

The setup

The campaign starts in a boat headed to a World War II-era jungle with several compatriots on a secret mission to rescue a scientist. This mission serves as a tutorial and backstory for the campaign set in the Cold War era.

The UI is similar to Goldeneye. It only shows your ammo count, minimap and damage is displayed by dirt and blood around the screen edge.

At the conclusion of the backstory you find yourself in a frozen world with three new compatriots who accompany you throughout the rest of the campaign. They provide no real support except witty banter and wildly missing NPCs while firing.

The environments give the feeling of vast snow-covered mountain ranges, massive burning cities or densely forested jungles, all while following a very linear and defined path. Most everything is destructible, lending a nice degree of realistic physics to the game. If you hide behind a wall, NPCs will launch RPGs or throw grenades at it to damage and ultimately destroy your cover.

The sound for weapons, grenades and other elements in the game is very well done. A grenade going off near you, on the other side of that wall, say, instantly brightens your display, mutes all other sound and makes you feel as though there’s a ringing in your ear before slowly fading the action back in. Snow cracks beneath your feet as you run from the pop of bullets hitting the ground behind you.

The story

The characters are fantastically stereotypical. “Fuck,” “mother fucker,” “shit,” and aren’t Dallas Cowboy’s cheerleaders hot. Sarge, the reluctant leader whose real name is irrelevant and never spoken as well as I can remember, gives the orders at the beginning of each mission and at checkpoints as the missions progress.

Sarge is front left, General What's-his-name is front right

I can’t remember the general’s name, frankly, I don’t know if they said it. It doesn’t matter. You’ll only see him again at the end of the campaign. His orders of being unorthodox and lethal are vague but exciting, right? They’ll appeal to my primal male instinct of wanting to kill.

The lethal part is easy. It’s physically impossible to run out of ammo. There are magical crates every few feet that have ammo and every gun you’ve encountered, or you could just pick up a gun from one of the bad guys. It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that there are no women in the game except the often fantasized cheerleaders.

From here on out your mission is to do something about a secret technology. For that you’ll need the help of the NSA—no, CIA—hell, what does it matter, cheerleader boy—aka, George Gordon Haggard, Jr.—is going to call him a spook the whole time while lamenting his how-did-we-end-up-here plight after just leaving the general’s office excited to be in special forces.

Not to miss out on any stereotyping opportunity, there’s a hippie.

He sounds like a hippie, man, and is a pacifist. Oh, don’t worry, the red-blooded, steak-eating, Cowboy-loving Texan lets the liberal have it. Ghost Rider here only pilots helicopters and will move you across South America as you complete your missions.

Naturally, the CIA agent is the prisoner of a bald, nondescript characterization of a Soviet-era Russian commander. You’ll chase this guy across South America in pursuit of the CIA agent and his all-valuable knowledge of the secret technology.

Haggard dispenses his share of munitions information along with the occasional reference to the finer points of Texan women. Again, he and all the other characters provide no useful assistance to you. Terrance Sweetwater is the anxious nerd in the group. He wears glasses, because, obviously, nerds wear glasses. Sweetwater provides snide remarks and generally bickers in a playful way with Haggard about the absurd danger of an off-the-cuff idea they came up with to resolve their situation. A guys-we’re-in-combat-not-a-locker-room reprimand swiftly follows from Sarge who immediately orders you to go do what they just said. Don’t worry. It’ll be absurdly easy. Your name is Preston Marlowe, by the way.

The voice acting on each character fits with what you’ve always perceived for that stereotype. Haggard is loud and boisterous with a Texas accent. Sweetwater is an often-nasally sounding smartass. Sarge has a wise, deep voice commensurate with his years of experience and service, a point he never lets you forget. Ghost Rider sounds like he’s from the California coast. You sound like a midwestern, nondescript male.

The conclusion

It took me less than six hours to complete the campaign. Normal should be called auto mode. Hard is presumably difficult in that it hopefully has consequences for running low on ammo. I’d replay it, but the dialog and plot are so painfully boring and uninteresting that I wasn’t even upset at the stupid ending. I half expected Haggard to ride a bull into the sunset with a bikini-clad woman on his knee.

Most of the missions have special guns to collect or other objectives that unlock achievements. I didn’t bother getting them all because who fucking cares?

All about multiplayer

This game isn’t about single player. This game is multiplayer. And that, I can’t stop playing.

New characters start off as a private with a basic set of gear that can put you at a disadvantage because with the game being so mature, most other players are going to have better weapons. Try and find a noob server to play on and you’ll be fine.

On the PC, 32 players compete on a myriad of maps with objectives ranging from capture-the-flag style play to a rush game where you destroy objectives. Running low on ammo does have consequences in multiplayer and forces the player to think strategically about how he or she plays their class.

Players may choose from four classes: assault, medic, engineer and recon. Each class has skills that help other players, which in turn boosts your score and thus encourages and rewards team work as a game mechanic. Those extra skills also provide more than one way to play Battlefield. The assault class can drop ammo around the battlefield, engineers can repair vehicles and medics can heal allies. As you gain points from kills, assisting and winning games you advance in rank which unlocks more weapons and gear.

Text chat is available, as are a number of pre-scripted voice commands that squadrons can use to organize, alert other players of nearby enemies and attack or defend with.

Not Goldeneye

A 14-year vacation from the genre allowed time for a lot to happen. In this case the graphics, sound, physics and scale improved dramatically. The core experience of the genre I remembered as a child has stayed basically the same. Maybe that’s why I can’t stop playing.