My love for the Battlefield series of games extends back to Battlefield 1942 which was released my freshman year of college. My roommates and I spent countless hours killing each other in the most creative ways possible.  Running each other over with jeeps, wing walking on airplanes, strapping explosives to pretty much everything in the level.  What made the game great was the open ended gameplay, large levels, and the introduction of vehicle based combat.  Battlefield: Bad Company 2 carries on this tradition of inovation.

While Bad Company 2 improves upon the multiplayer fun my roommates and I enjoyed, the single player game may seem a tad lackluster.  It is your standard military game plot, and if you have played Modern Warfare 2 and Crysis you can pretty much piece it together in your head.  The game follows the same group of soldiers that the original Bad Company title did, only this time the character’s personalities feel much more fleshed out.  One of the best examples of this, and my favorite part of the single player campaign, is the banter that occurs between your squadmates when there is no action happening.  They talk about their past, make jokes about each other, and fill the “boring” parts of the game with something worthwhile.  In fact, I found myself just sitting there in order for them to start talking.  When I wasn’t sitting around I was busy blowing up destructible environments, wreaking havoc in tanks, and sniping baddies off rooftops.  It is not that the single player game is bad in any way, it is just that the aforementioned activities are so much more fun when you are killing “real people” and you are not interrupted by predictable and stereotypical “plot”.  Which is where multiplayer comes in!

Bad Company 2 is quite possibly the best military multiplayer game around.  If you are a fan of military action movies and want to feel like you are in the film, this is the game for you.  The combination of destructible environments, vast weapon / vehicle choices, incredibly detailed maps, and variety of classes make Bad Company 2 an amazingly cinematic experience.  The amount of action happening in a level makes you feel like a small part of an epic battle that is raging all around you.  Watching the action take place from far away as a sniper is equally fun.  I often play this class because it lets me orchestrate parts of the battle by killing key targets or calling in mortars on certain locations.  No matter how you play Bad Company 2′s multiplayer, every match is a truly riveting and unique experience.

The single player campaign of Bad Company 2 is lacking in depth of story and does not really bring much new to the table, but it is a solid game none the less.  Luckily the multiplayer easily makes up for the single player downfalls and then some.  Once again the Battlefield series delivers an immersive military experience and sets the standard for multiplayer games to come.  9 out of 10.