Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - Shallow story and Anticlimactic

If you were a fan of the first game then be warned that this follow up loses all the charm early on. The accidental heroes of the first game are now legit - "the go to guys". Sure there is still the banter between the crew, but it's all superficial now. Take out the chatter and what you have is Call of Duty Modern Warfare 1.4. This leaves pretty much any player chemistry feeling more one dimensional than being essential to the story line.

Now about that story line....

I'm inclined to believe that Dice spent 4-5 months making game assets and 3 weeks cobbling the story together. Somebody on the story team threw out "The Japanese had a secret weapon in WWII". Then someone else said, Yeah and it makes like a Godzilla sound when it gets ready to go. From there on, the story becomes non essential. A majority of the cinematic characters both foe and friend are generic at best with the exception of just one. The talks between missions become filler stuffed between the various set pieces.

Something went real bad somewhere

I'm really getting the feeling the single game development was cut way short. There are some solid action pieces with nice construct, but there are just as many generic corridor shooter passages. I'll note the Satellite recovery mission - One minute you and your team are in a level plane environment and by missions conclusion you find yourself lost on a very high hill....literally freezing your ass off. You are tasked with running hut to hut to keep from freezing of exposure while taking out enemies. It screams Filler level.

Frostbite - What exactly was improved?

I expected more from the new Frostbite engine. As I mentioned, there are seemingly more generic corridor missions. The first game may not have had as much destruction capacity but there was more free ranging allowed than in this game. Just when you think you can flank the enemy in current game, a trail cuts out and you are either out of bounds or an invisible wall prevents you from moving on.

Even though you will find yourself in varied locales as in the first game, the scale of the areas and set pieces are decidedly smaller. The missions are also allot less varied. You will be subject to straight forward run and shoot for a majority of the game. The challenge is that foes just get more and more bullet resistant. Thankfully head shots do matter. There are the occasional target spotting and vehicle gunnery, but the experiences there are welcome but not exceptional.   

Back to that Story line again

By the time you realize you are on the last mission the events unfold in such an anticlimactic way. The choice of going guns blazing as well as the end solution result in a hollow victory up to the very last shot fired.

It wouldn't be hard to suggest the Bad Company 2 team are fans of Modern Warfare. I'm sure it's coincidence that a Russian invasion factors into both stories. Coincidence or not, the originality of Bad Company is lost and simply stands in the cold shadow of Modern Warfare. Had they stayed and developed the over the top direction of the original game, it's personality could have saved the day.