The Blackbox

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was released on the 5th March, so is it any good?

In short – yes, it’s great fun to play, however there are a lot (and I mean a lot) of niggly little bugs in it which spoil the fantastic gameplay. Things which annoy me the most:

• Certain unlocks not showing in the kit menu – eg. medic kit and ammo kit not being selectable (although they are there in game to be used thankfully).
• “Spotting” people is a nightmare and very inconsistent. You can be looking at someone perfectly and it won’t register, yet you can spam the button nowhere in particular and spot people!
• The server browser is one of the poorest I’ve ever used. This isn’t a new thing, many games have them, yet this lacks the most basic of features.

All of these things are quite trivial really in the overall game. Compared to Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142, this game has the balance of infantry to vehicles almost perfect apart from there being a lack of anti-air support. The audio is fantastic and it looks like this could finally be the follow on to Battlefield 2, which has been a long time coming.

In the latest patch for Left 4 Dead, Valve have decided to fix the difficulty under Versus mode to Normal.  I didn’t think much of this, having played on Expert and finding it ridiculously difficult, until I played it a few times.

What is now evident, is that people are just trying to rush through each level, instead of having to take it slow and steady and think about what they are doing.

Last night, 8 of us experienced gamers, on our own server, had to play it on Normal…. and it was boring. Too easy to fight off a rush of horde, too easy to kill Hunters, too easy to kill a Tank. Expert was too hard, Normal is too easy.

From the various threads I’ve read elsewhere it looks as if this is because people have been voting to change the difficulty mid-game – well here’s a novel idea – why not just disable that functionality?! Once a campaign has started, the difficulty can’t be changed. Let it be specified at the Lobby. That way all players know what they’re about to play. Don’t completely restrict the setting. I hate to think what an organised clan/team match will be like on Normal setting. It will be more like a sprint than a tactical team game.

Let me start by saying “epic game”. The Demo was fun, but the full version is even better.

The differing types of zombies, create a fun and, if someone doens’t have their wits about them, intense and fast paced gaming experience. When you first experience someone next to you getting jumped by a Hunter and tagged by a Smoker, the adrenaline kicks in as you desperately try to save them, knowing that you are shortly going to be confronted by an insane number of zombies round the next corner. When you’re first thrown up on by a Boomer, and the rush of zombies ignoring the other players and race straight for you find it funny, as your screen blurs and you can’t actually see how many there are. The first experience of a Tank – where you think you can run, and hide from it – but it follows you everywhere, and begins picking pieces of the world up and throwing them at you.

CoD4 provided an excellent game for both fun and competitive team-based gameplay, and so does L4D…. but it’s so much more exciting. The audio complements what is happening in the game, and adds to the experience. It’s intense, but sometimes hilarious as each person is simply swamped by zombies and you all know that you are shortly going to be starting the level again.

I am going to be losing many hours of my life to this game – and it’s going to be worth every minute.