Battlefield Bad Company 2 was a hit on the PS3 and Xbox 360 so seeing it being brought into a portable game should be interesting.
With the launch of N.O.V.A. 2 on the same day of it’s release Battlefield Bad Company 2 had some serious competition where FPS’s are concerned. The main campaign packs 14 short missions in 5 different battle zones from desert and snow environments to the jungle.
With a decent selection of weapons and explosives from pistols to machine guns to bombs keeping the campaign fresh is a real relief for this title. You can drive tanks around and fire out of helicopters also. Missions are quite varied with different tasks being spread out in each. Some missions you are ordered to meet the enemies with all guns blazing but in others you are told to sneak up on them in stealth. A combat system implemented helps you out by basically just hiding you behind obstacles.
The controls outright suck. There are few different controls setups to choose from but all didn’t work that well and definitely didn’t feel natural. I used the control setup which had an onscreen fire button but didn’t have an onscreen joy stick because again it sucked. Instead I just swiped the left hand side of the screen right, left, up and down which worked awfully and sometimes didn't respond at all. The precision of movement wasn’t that great with aiming of the gun either. Especially when looking through the iron sight, it just felt sluggish. Then theres the vehicles which you can drive like the tank being controlled like in Brother and Arms 1. Having bad controls really lets down the whole game.
The graphics look pretty decent but textures up close are not that detailed which is un-expectable for an FPS at this time on the iPhone. The environments look good but some have had more work put into them visually than others which is a huge shame. Guns look well polished and the physics put into shooting ect is pulled of well. Vehicles look good and enemies die and react mildly realistically. But it feels as if there could have been way more polish put into the overall graphics.
The sound is just dire. Now i’m not sure if this is an iPhone 4 problem but in the cut scenes voice acting is so quiet. And this goes right across the game with explosions and guns shots all seeming lifeless, it’s as if a tin can is over the top on all sound effects.
The multiplayer is unreviewable due to us all being kicked off the servers which never allowed us to try the different modes which were on offer and this is definitely a universal problem.
Overall Battlefield Bad Company 2 is a really weak game. The campaign has some really nice elements but bad controls, not polished enough graphics, awful audio and multiplayer which doesn’t work makes a this game not recommendable.
