It wasn’t until I started playing Battlefield Bad Company that I remembered how much I’d enjoyed Battlefield 2: Modern Combat on the Xbox, and then again on X360. It didn’t score all that well with reviewers but my friends and I seemed to play it more than Halo or Call of Duty. Its wild and competitive, vehicle-heavy multiplayer game was backed up by a strangely addictive solo campaign with its very own gimmick – ‘hot swapping’ – that meant you didn’t just play as one character, you could zip around and ‘be’ any of the soldiers in your unit – an innovative and fun game mechanic that I really liked, and that naturally, they’ve completely dropped for Bad Company.

In Bad Company you play as the newest member (Preston Marlowe) of a four-man squad that consists of Sergeant Samuel D. Redford ( Sarge), Sweetwater (tech & comms) and Haggard, the explosives expert . After a brief intro sequence you’re thrown into the thick of battle, the action comes loud and fast as Bad Company’s story moves from one location to another. The first things I noticed were the rather zoomed-in view and how twitchy the controls feel, the game lacks the subtlety of Call of Duty or Halo 3, and sadly fiddling with the sensitivity only means you end up turning slower than an oil tanker - it took me a good while to get used to the feel of the game. But on the good side, B:BC is a great looking game, you soon realize that the maps are absolutely massive, and they play as an almost completely explorable sandbox. If you played recent Gamecell favourite Frontlines: Fuel Of War you’ll be right at home here, as you get the same sort of freedom of choice how you approach each mission objective.

Ah yes, let’s talk some more about the damage and destruction you can cause... This really is a game for the frustrated demolition experts out there, as every vehicle, building, tree and any other object you may comes across is almost certainly destructible, at least to some extent. Buildings can be virtually gutted if not demolished, meaning that should you comes across a village with a sneaky sniper in a window you don’t need to carefully inch your way up and out-snipe him or flank him, you simply blow the building he’s in apart with a grenade or other heavy weapon and leave him exposed to your squad’s short arms fire – it’s extremely satisfying to be able to use the power of modern weapons in such a realistic way. The physics are a wonder to behold, and I even noticed bullets richoceting off of armoured targets! There’s a really tasty selection of weapons available throughout the game, and unlike some games you can always pick up downed enemies’ weapons, if for no other reason than to try them out.

A Battlefield game wouldn’t be a Battlefield game unless vehicles played a large part, and that’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned, although I know some people feel a FPS shouldn’t need them. Zooming around in a variety of armoured vehicles, attack boats and even an Apache attack chopper is great fun, although the boats feel like you’re pushing an overloaded shopping trolley, and the default helicopter controls still feel cack-handed. It's also kind of a poor show that you can’t take the gunner position in a vehicle while an AI squad mate drives (as you could in Halo 3). Squad mates also can’t be arsed to clamber aboard when you get in and rather just magically appear in the vehicle. This may have been done for gameplay purposes (anyone who’s waited for 30 seconds for a dopey marine to get in his Halo Warthog will know what I mean) but it does look rather lazy. In some circumstances the squad’s AI and path finding abilities are extremely dodgy too, I’ve seen them totally ignore an enemy that’s 20 feet away in plain sight, and get stuck on more than one occasion so they’ll have to ‘teleport’ back to you to catch up.

As in Halo 3 Bad Company has a promotional ranking system and as with Call of Duty 4 there are a number of different classes (Assault, Demolition, Specialist, Recon/Support), so the more you play the higher you rank (as long as you don’t keep killing friendlies!) and the more weapons/gadgets you acquire (all the cool secondary & tertiary gizmos like laser targeting systems have to be earned). Combine this with the attraction of the destructible scenery and I expect Bad Company’s multiplayer game to develop the same kind of faithful following as Call of Duty 4, and have a similar level of addictiveness and life-span. Every game I played in had a full roster of 24 players, and no-one was dropping out. One thing I did notice was that the voice communications either didn’t work - or more likely no one had a headset! - this was a bit of a downer after I'd previously experienced the X360 version and its lively banter. Because it doesn’t come with a headset, few PS3 online gamers seem to own one, so Sony should get a reasonably priced Bluetooth headset on the market quickly, or bundle one with the next big online game - it’s not just team games that lose something because of a lack of communication. But regardless of that, games were great fun win or lose, and jumping in an M1 tank or an Apache with a buddy who you can communicate with and seeking out the enemy’s gold stash won’t get tired any time soon.