What’s immediately apparent in the setup to Bad Company is that this game  is not meant to be taken seriously; not by you, and certainly not by the characters. It’s a genuine breath of fresh air to return to a war where the soldier have a bit of fun, and don’t spend all their time being moody and complicated together. Bad Company is meant to be a laugh, and although it’s on the ‘low row’ end of the FPS development scale, it succeeds quite admirably.

Your happy task is to join a special branch of the army populated by the dregs – the soldiers whose inability to function with normal people has led them to embarrass the brass time and again. Throwing these miscreants and ner’ do wells out would draw attention to their actions and publically humiliate the upper echelons for giving these idiots a gun in the first place, but they can serve another purpose…

This regiment (the so called ‘Bad Company’) is perfect for front line offensives and dangerous, dirty handed jobs. A lamentable collective of bullet fodder who succeed only through a blissful ignorance of their own ineptitude. That, and a disturbing willingness to blow stuff up and shoot at anyone who can, within the minutest definition of the term, be classed as hostile. Your character’s antics have brought him to be stationed with this band of irrepressible malefactors, and the quick build up of the premise proves you’re in exactly the right place.

But this comedic bent doesn’t mean DICE hasn’t gone all out in crafting a first rate and believable FPS. The lessons learned from developing the prolific Battlefield franchise over the years has been put to good use, and we see seven single player campaigns that sprawl over wide and varied terrain. These environments are right on photo-realistic but, more impressive, they’re very much reality-realistic too. Early claims regarding the rampant destructibility of the entire system were not exaggerated – this is a world that reacts to every bullet and bomb.