Bad Company Beta First Impressions

Well the game is too different to say its better or worse than COD4. It definitely is a Battlefield game for sure and that is good. The first thing I noticed is that it auto spots people for you; aka when you see an enemy it sends a signal to your teammates' map. The vehicles already seem to be a bit overpowered even if you are a demo expert. Even though I only played about 3 rounds before the server crashed I would have to say the game is definitely better than the previous Battlefield games just because it seemed to have more action happening every second.

There were no framerate issues I could see which is awesome. Blowing up buildings, although slightly different than I imagined, is very fun. A sniper is hiding behind a wind wall, just shoot a grenade into the wall and hes finished. Not all of the walls fall in the house, there are main support walls that keep it up which seemed like a good idea to keep the balance up. This is one reason why vehicles are slightly overpowered, they can just rail holes in buildings or demolish them if needed.

The new game mode, gold rush, is basically an attack-defend scenario that pits the attackers to destroy gold crates to win while the defenders try to stop them. The maps are broken into sections or bases much like Team Fortress' attack. After you capture both crates in one base you spawn there and the defenders spawn 1 base back. It works really well and makes for great action near those gold crates.

One thing I noticed is that sniping seems fun again, much like BF2. At one point I was with my squad leader on top of a desert dune sniping people running down a larger hill over to the gold building. The guns sound much more powerful and you really get that gun feeling out of them. When I finally started pegging people it felt great especially when I shot their noggins.

I could only get into a non-ranked match so I couldn't check out the unlocks yet but I did see how you obtain experience. Much like COD4 you get it from a points system; but you get extra points for doing harder things, like headshots or through-the-wall kills. My time with the game left me wanting more but unfortunately they seem to be having server issues that are preventing people from joining games. I figured this would happen but at least it wasn't like Halo 3 beta where I didn't even get to play until the day after the beta started.