You weren't there, man! Battlefield Bad Company 2 Vietnam Review

Another expansion to review. This one's only what, three months old? I'm getting better at this, most definitely. This time, instead of the grim darkness of the far future, we are heading to the jungles of Vietnam, with the aptly, if rather extensively, named DLC for Battlefield: Bad Company 2- Battlefield: Bad Company 2- Vietnam.

No screenshot utility, I'm afraid, so it's blurrycam time.

My fondness for the original game has already been discussed, and my love of combating communists is no secret, so I was super excited for this expansion, awaiting eagerly its release in December. A week beforehand, however, possibly in protest at being forced to play the abomination that is Black Ops, my PS3 gave up, the disc drive failing and denying me my prize. Now it is repaired, and the first thing I did upon retrieving it was download BFBC2-V. Loading up the base game, I saw the new main menu option and highlighted it. Upon doing so, the whole menu twisted and reshaped itself- the crisp, modernistic aesthetic of Bad Company 2 shifting to a dirtier, brownish theme, the militaristic background music giving way to Creedence Clearwater Revival. This thematic shift is representative of the whole expansion, really- Bad Company 2 was very definitely a modern combat experience, with its homing missiles, optical sights and high-tech vehicles. Vietnam, however, strips this away- in my first match (where I was top player, naturally) I was struck by how crude and brutal the combat was in comparison- without red-dot sights and motion sensors, fighting is done at close range with nothing but rifles and brawn. It's refreshing, in a perverse way, to have this almost rustic style of game, especially in comparison to Call of Duty, where being set in the Cold War instead of near future changed... nothing at all. BFBC2V does it right, though, with '60s style news reports playing over hippy riffs at the loading screens, it feels like a 'Nam game.

The gameplay of the expansion is similarish to the base game- it's still a squad based shooter, with different classes bringing different equipment and abilities to the fray, and an emphasis on vehicles and objectives. The base game's much-vaunted destructible environments feature, but are less prominent. Though this is, I suppose, thematically suitable (and y'all know how much I like stuff that is thematically suitable), with a limit to how much destruction can be done on a map consisting of some flimsy wooden huts and a hill, it would have been nice to see this feature return more prominently- one of my fondest memories of Bad Company 2 was tearing out the back wall of a building with a Black Hawk's minigun, collapsing the whole structure and crushing the enemies and objective within for an extraordinary number of points, but such a thing is not really possible here.

I love the smell of clichés in the blog post.

As you would expect, the equipment available has lapsed to what GIs and Viet-cong would have had access to- you've got your M16s and AK47s as well as the thunderous M60 machine gun and notorious M14 battle rifle. Vehicles have gone back a few numberplates, too, though the tanks and jeeps are really different only aesthetically to their modern counterparts. The new chopper, the UH-1 Iroquois, known affectionately as the Huey and iconic for its extensive service and appearance in limitless 'Nam flicks, has undergone some changes, though. Bad Company 2's Havocs and Apaches were, essentially, winged fortresses of fire and steel, spitting high-explosive death from above, but the Huey lacks the armour and avionics of these beasts. The lighter bird is more maneuverable and feels less clumsy than these, but small arms fire will damage it and heavy machine guns will tear it apart like paper. While its rocket pods and door mounted machine guns pack a punch, the Huey's coolest weapon is the speaker rack- as it swoops over the battlefield these blare out '60s classics, as well as Ride of the Valkyries, which is, frankly, awesome. Lamentably, you rarely hear the whole track, as every NVA regular for several miles will take a pot shot at it. Maybe they want the chopper destroyed; maybe they just really hate '60s music.

I have to say, I have hugely enjoyed my tour in Vietnam. The classic Battlefield gameplay is extremely solid, more so, I think, than people realise; maybe even better than the great Call of Duty leviathan. It's a game that lends itself to fantastic moments- once, on the NVA side, squatting in the bush with a sniper rifle I spied an incoming 4x4 with three GIs about to ford a river into our base. Quickly, I shot the driver- my exquisite marksmanship ensured the shot went right between the eyes- and the vehicle drew to a halt. The passenger, realising what had happened, leaped out and dived into the roadside trees, while the machine gunner fired wildly in the hope of neutralising the threat. Another precision shot brought him low, and a third killed the third American even as he desperately tried to spot me from his partially concealed position. Aside from being a demonstration in my consummate skill, it was a scene straight from a war film, and it felt very, very cool. I have more of these tales- charging wildly towards an endangered objective surrounded by NVA with naught but a shotgun and emerging the victor, smashing a Huey from the sky with a one-in-a-million shot from a tank's main gun- and I'm sure any Battlefield player would too.

I have it on good authority that chicks go wild for aircraft disguised as sharks.

I can't claim to have many complaints, apart from the aforementioned unwieldy title. There are a couple graphical issues, most notably a very noticable pop-in effect with objects far away- when the detail on that chopper suddenly and obviously ramps up as it approaches, it does rather spoil the moment, if not the bastard's aim. Additionally, there are fewer vehicles in this installment. Vehicles were always my favourite part of Battlefield since I am essentially a child, and their relative lack, especially on the NVA side (though crafty commies can redistribute them if they are sneaky), and the complete disappearance of mounted weapons, is a little disappointing. In the final (free) map pack for the base game they brought a map where both sides spawned with a gunship chopper, a transport chopper, two tanks, a couple 4x4s and some quadbikes- there were far more vehicle seats available than players on the map, and it was glorious- no such armoured affray is available. Sure doesn't spoil the game, though- it's a lot of fun, and even my black heart soars each time I strafe the socialists while blasting out Hendrix. While I'm not sure why DICE didn't release this as its own downloadable game in the vein of Battlefield 1943, it's certainly a welcome addition to a franchise that is going from strength to strength.

Something Approximating to a Black Ops Review

*checks watch*
*checks calendar*
*checks mysterious stone circle used by the ancients to measure the passing of aeons*

Six months? Time for a blog post!

Hello again, reader, if, contrary to my suspicions, you exist. After six months, one would assume I had been preparing some unstoppable megapost bursting utterly with fresh content, and one would be at least partially wrong. Y'all know I don't prepare posts; the actual time between decision to write one and it appearing on your screen is often a single day; that is simply how I roll. So, to the meat of the post.

As anyone with something that could be described as consciousness is doubtless aware, there is a new entry in the Call of Duty franchise. This is a fairly momentous event in the games industry, given the series has consistently sold numbers of copies approximately twice the population of Earth. So, being a blogger (and a fanboy), it is my duty and requirement to buy it and bore you with my opinions on it.

Named Call of Duty: Black Ops, this latest entry in the series ditched both the modern setting of the more recent games and the traditional WWII aesthetic in favour of exploring the grimy world of Cold War espionage. Instead of the usual heroism and apple pie, players would experience denied operations- assassinations, sabotage and mutually assured destruction. The single-player campaign promised to centre around one of the aforementioned assassins and saboteurs, being tortured for information, with the playable missions following his flashbacks as the interrogation slowly draws what is needed from him. The set up, then, was excellent, and the game looked ready to take on last years leviathan Modern Warfare 2, one of my personal favourites and the best selling game or possibly thing in the course of human history. But how was the execution? The game was developed not by Infinity Ward, creators of the Call of Duty franchise and later its excellent Modern Warfare subseries, but Treyarch, secondary developer and annualisation puppet of the Activision overlords. Could the game hold up to the hype? Well, no.

Completing the campaign of Black Ops was a bit of a chore, in truth, with a few notable exceptions such as the Vietnam missions, but that's probably more to do with my pathological love for the Vietnam War than anything. Perhaps it was nostalgia from the first Modern Warfare, but MW2's characters interested and entertained me so much more than Black Ops, though, admittedly, Woods is badass and awesome. The Cold War theme fails to quite hit home- at no point did I really feel like radioactive Russians were under my bed, as I understand was the norm in the ‘60s. Gameplay is standard CoD fare- shooting people, blowing up things. The covert nature of the so called black-operations also seemed ill-explored. The first Modern Warfare had an interesting duality going on- there were the US Marines, very much in the media eye, subject of news bulletins played over loading screens, and also the SAS- the hyper-competent, ultra-covert killers, battling the Russians without anyone apparently realising. There was a similar deal in MW2- bearded man’s man Captain Price remarks that the epic suicide revenge mission he planned would go unremembered, for instance. This all served to remind you of the global significance (or not) of the events portrayed in the game. Black Ops didn’t do the same, at least for this reviewer. It could be the repetition, but the set-pieces in Modern Warfare's storylines excited me more, the missions gripped more, the single-player maps were more interesting to me. Though I never thought of MW2's single player as its strongpoint, it managed to entertain me significantly more than BO's.

The almost comically awesome Frank Woods.

As for multiplayer, well; I loved Modern Warfare 2. I loved it despite the quickscoping, and the lightweighting, and the noob-tubes, and the nuke boosting. Again, maybe it was just me, maybe I naturally evolved my play style to the point that these things ceased to affect me overtly, but in any case, though they bothered me, they did not break the game. I loved the pace, I loved the killstreak rewards, I loved the challenges and rank progression, I loved the maps. Though I consider myself a serious gentleman and hardcore gamer, I rank this mainstream shooter among my favourite games of all time. As such, when I heard about Treyarch's attempts with Black Ops to remove much of the, frankly, bullshit, prevalent in MW2's multiplayer, I was ecstatic- the game I loved, streamlined, purified, and with a sweet Cold War setting to boot!? I was stoked beyond belief. I went to a midnight launch for Black Ops, which is not something I have done previously, and was among the first to buy the game. From here, however, everything went downhill.

The maps seem overcomplicated and poorly designed- sometimes, a minute can go by before a shot is fired in a standard match, as the maps simply do not allow the free flowing, fast paced action of MW2. I may be imagining it, but the core gunplay seems to have been altered, and, to me, ruined- the perfect gunplay the series has had since the beginning, gone. The progression system has been tampered with, too; but the new "CoD Points" system simply lacks the compulsion to achieve and improve that the challenge-based system of MW2 and its precursor had for me.

A Huey, swinging in to minigun most of downtown Havana to the ground.

The new, watered down killstreak rewards also fail to hold up for me- while I realise the cumulative element of MW2's rewards irked many, I felt it really enhanced the gameplay- the greater amount of choppers and fighters buzzing overhead made possible by this approach making the match that much more spectacular. Black Ops, by contrast, seems to have lost that exciting element of support. Now, we have legions of ridiculous, slightly childish, and damn near unstoppable toy cars screeching after dismayed Special Forces operatives, with the odd spy plane or attack chopper swooping in to lend some credibility to the notion that this is an actual conflict between factions armed with machines more threatening than those given to children. Being awesome, I am familiar with some of the more unobtainable rewards, such as the Blackbird (actually a good idea, giving real time information of enemy position and facing), Chopper Gunner (this time a bloke hanging out the door of a Huey with a minigun instead of MW2's monstrous Apache/Havoc chain gun) and Gunship (granting full control of an Mi-24A Hind attack helicopter to the player) and they just don't excite like the hovering Harrier, lumbering Pave Low or earthshaking AC130 on offer in MW2. Incidentally, the reward vehicles are the same for all multiplayer factions. While MW2 was not perfect in this regard (why some Brazilian gangsters were in a position to employ special operations gunships and bombers used only by the US Air Force always puzzled me), the Russians using a Hind where the Americans used a Cobra was at least a nod to the military aircraft enthusiast section of the playerbase, which might be populated by me alone. Here, doubtless aware that most players couldn’t tell a UH-1 from an F-15E (cretins), Treyarch has used the same visuals for every killstreak for every faction, a reminder of the apparent laziness I observed in my very first review feature.

My hard-earned Chopper Gunner being shot down by some mouthbreather with a missile launcher.

The game is not utterly bereft of virtue. What Treyarch has messed up has been unable to totally overpower all that Infinity Ward originally did so well- the game is still recognisable as Call of Duty, whether that name fills you with a fanboy’s excitement or a game-snob’s dread, and therefore the experience is intense and memorable, though, perhaps, not to the same extent as one of Infinity Ward’s offerings. Some of Treyarch’s additions are actually rather nifty, such as the Theater mode- unoriginal, but still entertaining, and very useful for adding screenshots to a blog post- and the Wager matches, where players are given some fairly obscure weapons and made to fight to the death. The single player, while a little railroaded, does have a compelling Cold War action thriller at heart, and a couple of delightful badasses in the form of Frank Woods (straight talking Commie slayer) and Jason Hudson (ice-cool, shades wearing CIA operator), and the occasional shining set-piece. The Zombie mode is fun, too, and the semi-secret level where players assume the roles of Kennedy, McNamara, Nixon and Castro to fight of the horde of undead is simply hilarious.

There's me! Defending my care package from a Cuban like a good capitalist should.

The conclusion that I am forced to draw in the end is that Black Ops is the product of a franchise that has become a victim of its own success. Obviously, I am no corporation-hating-commie-liberal, but I am truly concerned about what the dark council at Activision is doing to my beloved Call of Duty series. In a better, kinder world, Infinity Ward would produce astounding games at the rate they desired, and Treyarch would not be forced to produce annual entries into blockbuster franchises. Black Ops is a game that drives fellas like me to write long-winded blog rants, not because it is so bad, but because it should be something better.