Graphics, sound, gameplay and features are all spot-on. But unfortunately, the good elements of the game are keeping bad company.

Often games story lines can seem a little too serious and sombre or if they try to be funny, they fail through a bout of bad scripting and cliché jokes. With Bad Company, that's really not the case. The voice acting is delivered well with banter and jokes that are both natural and funny.

The one game that everybody seems to be comparing Bad Company to is Call of Duty 4. To be honest the graphics aren't as good, but the landscapes are so much bigger and because of that, the grandeur of the whole thing is more than enough to compensate.

Physics are getting increasingly important for games to implement and nobody does it better than EA do with Bad Company. Using the Frostbite engine, EA have created landscapes that are destructible in ways that no game has been before. If someone is annoyingly taking cover in a building, don't wait for them to creep around the corner, just blow a whole in the side of the building using some sort of heavy artillery and get them that way. But it's not just buildings that destructible, pretty much everything is. I knows it's not very eco-friendly of me, but there is little more satisfying than felling trees in the wake of your gunfire and grenade explosions.

But all these great elements are optimised by one thing that lets the otherwise fantastic package down. The fact that you have a never-ending medical syringe that puts your health back up to full is ridiculous. As though that isn't bad enough, when you do die and respawn, the enemies that you have previously killed remain dead. This results in a game that is as challenging as a 1-piece jigsaw puzzle.

Multiplayer is where Bad Company really stands out. It's crazy, fast paced and full of action. There is presently only one type of gameplay available, 'Gold Rush' but a free download is on its way that will include 'Conquest'. In Gold Rush the objective is to either protect or destroy crates, pushing the enemy pack with every successful act of sabotage.

The Battlefield has rarely been this good - even if you are in bad company.

SCORE: 9 / 10

9:04am Friday 18th July 2008

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