Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Hands-On Impressions

More coverage of Brutal Gamer’s trip to the Eurogamer Expo.

Quite late on during day 2 of the Eurogamer Expo, I got a chance to play some of the multiplayer for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on Xbox 360 with BalaamSafe from Scrambled Pixel.  Here’s the lowdown on what we experienced.

The demo on show at the Expo felt very much like a meeting point between the original Bad Company and Battlefield 1942.  The game mode showcased was a control point game, in similar style to 1942, but with 3 flags rather than 5.  There are 4 playable classes.  There is the assault class, with an emphasis on powerful weapons.  The medic class deals with keeping the team alive, as you might expect.  Engineers deal with keeping vehicles in tip top condition, and the Recon class is the sniping class.

The first thing that you notice is just how much Dice have improved the graphics for the sequel.  Everything’s so much crisper and cleaner.   There was only one map on display with the demo, which was a sandy coast, or posssibly island.  I didn’t explore enough to find out.  In any case, there is a great improvement in the level of detail in the graphics, with great particle effects and huge explosions.

HUD displays are kept as unintrusive as possible, with a small display in the bottom corner showing the current match details, which are displayed in numbers rather than the bars of Battlefield 1942, so it’s much easier to see how long it will be until you win the match.

The sound is all very nice, with some nice loud and suitably meaty explosions and communications detailing exactly where you have to go.  There’s a bigger selection of driveable vehicles in game.  As well as the standard tanks and trucks, you also get buggy style vehicles that can traverse the landscape quite quickly, but in the style of the smaller Halo 3 vehicles, you are unable to shoot from them.  You can try and run the enemies over, however.  You can also pilot helicopters in the game, which is a welcome change from the planes of 1942.  There was an interesting moment where I was manning the railgun on a team-mates tank, only for a member of the opposing team to attempt to crash their helicopter into our tank and just miss, resulting in a massively satisfying explosion right in from of us.

Overall, the 20 or so minutes I spent with this was a lot more fun than the multiplayer in both the original Bad Company and Battlefield 1942.  I certainly will be looking forward to this one.

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