The sting from the success of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is still hot. But Electronic Arts is taking a shot at rival Activision Blizzard with Battlefield Bad Company 2. Today, it revealed new details of its first-person shooter game, set in the modern combat era.
The game continues the tradition of having buildings and an environment that are entirely destructible. You can shoot through walls and knock down structures to gain a tactical advantage. You can ride into combat on vehicles such as ATVs or rain death from above as a side gunner in a helicopter.
Some of the combat is over the top. Your helicopter chain gun can collapse whole buildings, which makes it seem as powerful as the main gun of a tank. The single player campaign begins in northern Alaska as a patrol stumbles onto a secret plot by the Russians to develop a weapon that could tip the scales in the balance of power. The combat takes place across locations in North and South America.
I watched snippets from the single-player campaign and played a few rounds of the multiplayer combat on the Xbox 360. In the fighting, you have to remember that the enemies can shoot right through the wooden shacks that you use as cover. I found it quite fun to launch a rocket into a building where an enemy was hiding. We fought over objectives, like a site where you had to plant a bomb and keep enemies from disarming it.
I’ll await the final version, but the speed of the game still needs some optimizing, as it felt like it could have been more responsive. The multiplayer combat features “Squad Mode,” where four players can fight against four in a serious firefight where you have to grab the other players’ base. You fight everywhere from snow-capped mountains to lush jungles. Both the single player and multiplayer games are a lot of fun, and the game should be enticing to hardcore Modern Warfare 2 players. Besides having more destructible environments, the Battlefield game also has 15 vehicles you can drive, whereas Activision Blizzard’s Modern Warfare 2 has none. EA is expected to take another punch at Activision later this year with a new Medal of Honor game.
The mature-rated game is being developed by EA DICE and is scheduled to ship on March 2 on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the PC. We did a video interview with game producer Karl-Magnus Troedsson at an event in San Francisco (below). The second video is the official trailer from GameTrailers.
Interview with Battlefield Bad Company 2 from Dean Takahashi on Vimeo.