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Battlefield: Bad Company has a plot. It's important to note because this is the first game in the Battlefield series to actually have a single-player, story-driven campaign. In past instalments, the single-player mode was exactly the same as multiplayer except with bots. This change pleased me because I'm a story whore and have this nagging feeling that a game is incomplete if it doesn't at least have some cursory single-player experience.

I praise the fact that the plot exists but can't actually praise the plot itself. From what I heard about the game prior to its release, the premise seemed okay: a team of soldiers goes AWOL to steal gold in a war zone (ed note: We Three Kings be stealing the gold). The game begins with Preston, a regular Army grunt who tells us in voiceover that he's been assigned to the misfit "B Company" (aka "Bad Company") because of some misconduct he never explains. His chopper lands at a base in some forest and he meets the rest of his squad: a pyromaniac, an "I'm too old for this" black sergeant (as seen in Aliens, Predator, Halo, etc.) and a four-eyed nerd. After a little banter, we're off to the front and we learn that they're in Russia. "A war with Russia? How'd that happen?" you might wonder. You will continue to wonder this for the rest of the 8-10 hours of the single player campaign because it's never explained.

The plot never evolves beyond that the one sentence premise I mentioned above: a team of soldiers goes AWOL to steal gold in a war zone. While fighting in the Russian wilderness, the squad finds out about a mercenary army hoarding gold bars and they quickly decide to risk their lives and throw away their careers to acquire this treasure. What follows is the usual routine of attacking one base to blow up a communications dish, grabbing a jeep to drive to the other base so you can blow up the anti-aircraft guns, etc. Though you're supposed to be AWOL, you'll still feel like an errand boy. With all these small generic tasks, the plot drifts off into the background and you find yourself just mindlessly driving from one red triangle on your minimap to another. Occasionally you'll have a brief cut scene and a character will say something like, "Oh man, I can't wait to get that gold!" but these moments felt a little like a  poor effort of reminding you of the plot rather than actual storytelling.

The marketing of this game led me to believe this would be a really irreverent, wacky war story but the game never really commits to that. If you were looking for some realistic, quirky new age war time combat, you won’t be impressed. Your grenades have little smiley face tags attached to them and at one point you can drive a golf cart - that's about as quirky as things will get. Unlike the Bad Company adverts, which made fun of competing FPS games relentlessly, the game itself is pretty restrained. While it was kind of amusing that the players slobbered over "Miss July," the female superior officer with an attractive voice who radios in your orders throughout the game (a staple of action games), the fact remains that the game still has a female superior officer with an attractive voice. The game never tries to put a new twist on these clichés and it's almost as though they're worried the game will be less cool or bad-ass if there was any comedy to water down the violence and mayhem of the gameplay.

As I mentioned, the generic military FPS tasks you're given throughout the game (drive here, put explosives on this thing, kill those guys) do make the game wear thin after extended play but the basic action of the game is very fun. With most of the game taking place outdoors, you're given plenty of leeway in how you'll approach and assault your objectives. The game has a wide range of weapons and vehicles lying around for you to toy around with. I hate to say something like, "this game makes you feel like you're really on a battlefield" because of how bad does that sound especially when you consider actual soldiers but the fact remains that Bad Company does an excellent job of making the action frantic and nerve-wracking gameplay feel real. The weapons and vehicle sounds are vivid and just plain scary. When an explosion goes off near you, your ears ring. Many other recent games like Gears of War have neat "cover" systems where you press a button and your character dives behind a pillar to safely evade incoming fire. Bad Company, however, has something I like to call a "screw cover" system; the environments are highly destructible in Bad Company so whatever wall you're hugging might be blown up in about five seconds. The mercenaries you'll fight have a healthy amount of explosives so it happens quite often and it's exhilarating to realize you're never completely safe from harm. The AI learns and adapts to what kind of cover your hiding behind. Hiding behind trees will do you no good, the Russian AI will simply blow each and every tree from around you. Things like this can leave you running miles through open country without even a fence to cower behind.