When I started my playthrough of Bad Company, I didn’t intend to play all Battlefield campaigns back-to-back. In fact, the thing that prompted me to dive into both Bad Company games when I did was finding out they would soon be delisted. They were on my backlog so I knew I wouldn’t lose them, but for some reason, the news renewed my curiosity about those two games in particular, and I decided to give them a go. After starting BC, however, I felt like I had to play the rest of the Battlefield games with no real justification other than this slightly bizarre sense of franchise experience accomplishment.

So over the next couple weeks or so, while I play them back-to-back, I'll be posting my thoughts on every Battlefield game since Bad Company that came out with a single player campaign. And ‘campaign' is the absolute keyword here. I'm not into multiplayer so I won’t be touching on that aspect, although I know that, for many players, the pull towards the franchise lies in its online appeal. This is important to recognise because one particular game may excel in its multiplayer content and suck for its single player counterpart, or vice-versa. I have no idea how the Battlefield franchise multiplayer component is like.With that out of the way, these will be my impressions on each of my campaign experiences from a fresh, first playthrough, nostalgia-free perspective. Starting, of course, at the beginning.

With that out of the way, these will be my impressions on each of my campaign experiences from a fresh, first playthrough, nostalgia-free perspective. Starting, of course, at the beginning.

Bad Company was a pretty decent start to my Battlefield journey, but I can’t help but assume the boat for me to have been wowed by this game had left long before I played it. By today’s standards, I think BC is a good game, not a great one. I enjoyed the silly humorous tone in which the four characters were written, and I appreciated the lighthearted feel of the story, which narratively, drifts somewhat away from the usual army archetypes you see in these games. However, what I absolutely loved were the destructible environments and how they played a big part in battles. I know the franchise is very known for this (by then maybe only Red Faction had done it better), and even with technical limitations of the time, there was no better feeling than to watch a building crumble down because you bombed it into oblivion. I also really appreciated the weapon sounds, which without being over-the-top, were punchy enough to cause significant impact. Another thing I liked was the openness of the levels and the way the game divides each mission in short chunks. Finally, I found some of its design choices quite interesting (examples of this were that respawning memorises the enemies you’ve already killed, or the infinite supply of equipped health shots that keeps things fast-paced). This is all good stuff.

But the game unequivocally shows its age in a lot of ways. The controls aren't great, the damage indicators are piss poor, your squadmates are dumb as bricks in battle, driving is a bit atrocious and feels insanely floaty, and the checkpoint system is wildly inconsistent. Additionally, I wasn’t ecstatic about the game's difficulty. Being tough as nails is fine, but the reasons why BC feels tough as nails is a different can of worms: not only does your character feel slow/sluggish, enemies are quite bullet spongy (though you can headshot them), are able to hit you from miles away, and seem prescient in their ability to detect you. You eventually get used to all of this, but it still feels artificially inflated.

All that said, my time with Bad Company was solid, and by today's standards, solid is exact the word I'd use to describe this title. I didn't love it now, in 2023, but I still consider it a good starting point for the franchise. 7/10