So I’ve been playing some of the Battlefield: Bad Company beta test this morning. I wanted to get a few rounds in as attacker and defender to get a good feel for the game before I talked about it. It’s a beta, and while the game seemed pretty polished, I imagine a lot of balance tweaking will be happening.

The game was a bit confusing at first. You get a brief video tutorial, and then you jump into an online match and bombs are exploding all around you, bullets are whizzing by… I think it’s safe to say it’s got a lot more “war” going on than some other traditional Battlefield titles. In fact, it’s just quite a bit different from other Battlefield titles period.

It’s clearly a Battlefield game, but it’s like “Battlefield Arcade”. And after the first round, and getting the hang of it, it was actually pretty fun.

High explosives like missiles/RPGs/tank shells will actually destroy whole sides of buildings. A whole lot of the environment is destructible. I was riding around in a humvee and the guy in my mounted gunner position was just chopping down trees with the steady stream of bullets.

The name of the game is basically objective capture, but with a little twist. Everyone is after gold crates. The attackers want the gold (which in some warped logic they obtain by blowing the crate to shit) and the defenders want to keep the attackers from getting the gold.

Each “base” has two crates. When they are destroyed, the defenders fall back further down the map to defend the next base with two crates. The attackers then spawn at the defender’s previous base.

Each time the attackers advance, they get additional reinforcements. That’s essentially respawns, of which there are a limited overall number for the attackers. The attackers win if they achieve every gold crate, the defenders win if they force the attackers to use all of their respawns without achieving their goal. It ends up being pretty fun.

General Battlefield behavior seems to have carried over to the console. The practice of jumping into a vehicle and speeding off and/or running over teammates who want to get in seems alive and well here. Can’t really blame that on the game as much as on the idiot players.

I can’t say I’m excited about Bad Company as I am for Battlefield Heroes, but that’s not to say I think it’s a bad game. It definitely has some potential.