Battlefield: Bad CompanyPublisher:Electronic Arts
Platform:Xbox 360. PlayStation 3
UK Price (as reviewed): TBC
US Price (as reviewed):$58.99 (inc. Delivery)

Bad Company has, just like the main characters featured within it, had a rough time of it over the past few months. Not only does it bear the stigma of being the first proper Battlefield game to debut on a console, but it’s also singleplayer-focused.

Plus, there was that whole thing with the DLC weapons, which has since been scrapped.

Now, though, the game is here and we can all see for ourselves if these drastic changes to one of the most beloved PC multiplayer franchises have paid off or not – whether it’s good to be bad, or if Bad Company is just too bad to be good. We take a look at the Xbox 360 version of DICE’s new console-irific shooter…

GoldrushBattlefield: Bad Company does a lot of new things; destructible environments and online stat-tracking among them, but the most unusual revolution of the game is definitely the singleplayer campaign.

In a time when singleplayer games are deemed as low-tech and MMO’s are heralded as the future, EA must have been my uncle Crazy McEffinloon to take an established multiplayer series and introduce a singleplayer story to it – surely that indicates the singleplayer is just going to be a tacked-on string of ‘bot fights added in for those without Xbox Live?

Surprisingly, no. Bad Company’s mano-et-nada campaign is surprisingly well rounded and well-built, with an actual story to tell and everything!

As the game begins, players are dumped into the boots of Preston Marlowe, a generic everyman solider who remains as blank a template as possible throughout the game. One of the few things we know about Preston is that he either isn’t that great a soldier, or that he’s got some really rotten luck – those are the only ways a grunt can end up in the B-Company group of the U.S. Army, otherwise known as the Bad Company.

Bad Company is where the men in the White House, who sip pleasantly on Pimms and bourbon throughout the fictional Russian/American war the game is set during, throw all the cast-offs and failed renegades. B-Company is good for one thing; fodder – but it’s also exactly Preston’s kind of place and he quickly fits in with a four man squad.

The squad itself is a stereotypical as you could imagine. There’s Sweetwater, the geeky (read: wears glasses, knows trivia) mouthpiece-stroke-coward of the unit. A woolly-capped hick with a penchant for mushroom clouds and sleeping with his cousins called Haggard, provides the muscle of the group and finally there’s Sarge – big, bad, black and brimming with attitude, but with only three days left ‘til retirement.

Under appreciated and completely expendable, B-Company has no delusions and the only hope the squad has is that it can prove it’s worth on the battlefield and get moved to a different company…that or make a fortune elsewhere.

It’s at this point in the plot where the sub-plots start taking over and the War against The Red, which seemed so important for the first few hours of the game, gradually starts to fade out as the quartet runs across a group of mercenaries who are paid in gold ingots. From that point on, gold fever takes over and the idea of winning the war goes out the window faster than bit-tech’s mobo specialist when an ice cream truck goes past.