Bad Company 2: Vietnam (Review)

Bad Com­pany 2: Viet­nam is here, well at least for PC play­ers who pre­ordered it at the EA store or on Steam. If you are like me you had this pre­or­dred weeks ago and now it is finally here. Many games this year have been mas­sive dis­ap­point­ments. Games that we had high expec­ta­tions of, most of which had high price tags, were com­plete let downs. Need­less to say when I pre­ordered BC2:Vietnam I was concerned.

I am happy to say that BC2: Viet­nam is superb, Activi­sion take note, this is what DLC should be. BC2 Viet­nam boasts 5 brand new maps, 6 new vehi­cles, 15 addi­tional new weapons that are char­ac­ter­is­tic of the time period, 60’s sound track and new voices to boot. In addi­tion to this there are some other weapons that are in BC2 but they are Viet­nam era mod­els. With a price tag of 14.99 this is quite a bit of con­tent, espe­cially when com­pared to the mea­gre offer­ings of Activi­sons DLC which only con­tain 5 maps and half of which are just rehashes of pre­vi­ous releases on older titles. I may shoot myself later for say­ing this but this cur­rent offer­ing by DICE and EA could of eas­ily jus­ti­fied a $30.00 price tag and if they had a single-player cam­paign to boot it prob­a­bly could of stood as it’s own title.

Viet­nam does not come with it’s own cam­paign… while this is dis­ap­point­ing to me in one aspect, at 14.99 I didn’t expect one and with the amount of con­tent it had I am quite happy with­out it. I should men­tion that this in an Era rarely cov­ered in games and well at that. It would be nice to see a single-player cam­paign designed around Viet­nam. It’s a story still fairly untouched by the game industry.

The maps are a real stand­out for me in this expan­sion. Fol­low­ing the stan­dard Bat­tle­field map lay­out the maps are designed for 3 types of game­play. Rush, con­quest and squad death­match. One map that really stood out to me and actu­ally evoked some emo­tion from the dev­as­ta­tion that I saw around me was Hill 137. If any of you have seen Ham­burger Hill, the movie, this map is based off that. If you want to read more about the bat­tle at Ham­burger Hill you can read about it here. It’s actu­ally quite an inter­est­ing read. The map takes you at the start, play­ing rush, depend­ing on the side you start on, in the jun­gle mov­ing up to take com­mand points. After your team cap­tures the first set of com­mand points you move into the sec­ond stage of the map which is a mas­sive hill that has been bombed into obliv­ion. All you see are burn­ing trees and scorched ground. The fires look real and believ­able and with the gun­fire and the scream­ing of your squad-mates around you ele­vates that real­ity. This is prob­a­bly my favorite map out of the ones I have played so far. From what I can tell all of the maps will play on all three game modes. This is dif­fer­ent from the orig­i­nal BC2 release where only some of the maps were playable in some game modes.

Rush mode made a big stand­out to me on Viet­nam as well. Unlike the rush mode in BC2, and this could be con­tributed to the way the maps are designed, felt much more focused. There were cer­tain maps where you could lit­er­ally cre­ate a choke point in the map and the only way to break that defen­sive line is to use a mix­ture of vehi­cles, medics, assault and snipers. This results in epic amounts of car­nage, destruc­tion and death. Without the proper com­bi­na­tion or “team­work” your team would get slaugh­tered. That being said, it was very annoy­ing when you got placed on a bad team or one that didn’t work well together. It could make for some very long and frus­trat­ing rounds.

I’ve found that much like with BC2, Viet­nam is best played with a group of friends. I have a group of about 8 guys I play with and when we coor­di­nate together it’s about the most fun I have gam­ing period. Noth­ing beats a cohe­sive team in BC2 or Viet­nam. You will walk all over the other team if you have a well coor­di­nated group of guys. If there is one com­plaint I have about the Bad Com­pany series it is that it doesn’t really encour­age the team to play as a team. Instead you just find guys walk­ing around shoot­ing what­ever they can see.

The weapons are great as well in Viet­nam. All of them feel authen­tic and real and fit with the time period. The only gun that I felt was a lit­tle over­pow­ered com­pared to the rest was the PPSH. The gun has almost dou­ble the fire rate of any other SMG and beats most the MG’s in the field as well and it’s far to accu­rate com­pared to what the tra­di­tional SMG should be. I think the AK47 and the MG60 are my favorites in this expan­sion, it’s extremely grat­i­fy­ing to drop some­one with both of those weapons.

Sound fol­lows in the foot­steps of it’s pre­de­ces­sor and does not dis­ap­point. When not play­ing with a group of peo­ple I have it blast­ing on my 1000 watt sound sys­tem and close range explo­sions and MG fire cre­ate bass that will knock pic­tures off your wall. Gun­fire sounds superb and when you are in large fire fights with small arms fire, explo­sions, motors and scream­ing going on all around you I found that the game feel incred­i­bly immer­sive and intense.

I touched on this a lit­tle bit before but the visu­als in the game are top notch. Hill 137 again was where they really stood out. I think this is the best look­ing map in the Bad Com­pany series hands down. I also think the game plays smoother then BC2 did. I don’t think any new graph­ics were added per say but I think the game was opti­mized before it was released. I can feel the dif­fer­ence between BC2 and Viet­nam. Over­all Viet­nam looks bet­ter then it’s predaces­sor in most regards with the excep­tion of explod­ing tree’s. When a tree gets knocked down it cre­ates a paper explo­sion. The leaves look like thin, flat, green, pieces of paper. This seems like some­thing they could of spent an extra day on but it’s def­i­nitely not a big deal.

PC gamers will be happy to know that the game has got­ten released first on PC and that the game has been opti­mized for the plat­form as well. The game plays well and does not feel like it was ported from a con­sole ver­sion to the PC. If you have a decent machine, you are in for a real treat. I run the game on medium set­tings using eye­fin­ity on 3 x 25″ mon­i­tors, AMD 965 Phe­nom X2, 8gb of ram, Radeon 5850. The game looks fan­tas­tic even on medium set­tings. I haven’t tried on High set­tings yet because eye­fin­ity triples the drain on my video card. How­ever, being that the game feels like it runs smooth I will prob­a­bly try it out and see how it feels.

Over­all BC2: Viet­nam is the best value for your money I have seen in a long time. You get basi­cally an entirely new name with the excep­tion of a single-player cam­paign for the price of 14.99. This is an expan­sion more than a DLC but I can’t help but won­der why DICE and EA can put out essen­tially a new game for 14.99 when Activi­sion can’t even put out 5 orig­i­nal maps for the same price. I’m not a fan of EA but EA and DICE got it right with this expan­sion. This is one of the best DLC/Expansions of the year hands down. If any of you are con­sid­er­ing pur­chas­ing this, buy it now, you won’t be disappointed.

Final Score: 9.5/10