For those that care about story in a Battlefield game (which, most likely, is nobody), Bad Company 2 actually has one. It's fairly cheesy, so those wanting some modern war epic should look elsewhere. The plot follows the four soldiers of Bad Company as they track down a "new" superweapon in development by Russian forces. You might not immediately get that this game is about Bad Company, as the intro mission starts off with a World War II raid, but it all links together in the end. The storyline follows the same sort of conceit that Modern Warfare 2 did. It assumes players want to immerse themselves in a Tom Clancy pseudo-science fiction universe rather than the real one. The dialogue is stilted, the set pieces are extremely predictable (how many jungles and arctic refuges are players going to encounter in first-person shooters?), and the overall theme is just plain silly. Despite all of this, it's still better than Modern Warfare 2's story, if just because it doesn't purposefully shove "shocking" moments down your throat. There's also a hilarious dig at Infinity Ward's cash cow if you get far enough in the campaign.

The gameplay of the story is alright, and serves as little more than an introduction to each weapon and the cover destruction system. You go from objective to objective, with each one having an area around it open to move in. If you stray outside this area for longer than 10 seconds, you die. The goals are rarely anything besides "kill everyone in the area," but there are a few cool scenes out of nowhere, such as gunning down someone with a hostage without harming the hostage. Destroying the terrain is the real draw of single-player, as the enemy AI is so stupid that they linger around cover that has been annihilated. Plus, wooden shacks explode quite spectacularly when you detonate C4 inside them. When in single-player, you have two side-tasks you can perform, if it strikes your fancy. You can seek out M-COM stations and destroy them (they are normally located inside random houses), and you can collect guns from corpses and stashes. Not bad for a single-player Battlefield effort overall, but certainly not on par with other first-person shooters.

Bad Company 2 is visually and auditorially stunning game. While the scenes you encounter playing alone or online are hardly inspired, they are rendered simply and elegantly. The special effects, such as fog, dust, and smoke, are where Bad Company 2 really shine. For example, you might be cruising down the road in a tank on a desert map, only for a tank shell to explode in front of you, kicking up a screen of dust that makes it impossible to see. This is accompanied by heavy-hitting sound effects. Vehicles have the best sound, with explosions being a close second and the various shouts (most of which are automatic) being third. Guns sound alright, and there are a few distinctive gun noses (Blackhawk mini-gun and F2000 spring to mind), but most of the guns sound the same as their counterparts. It may be realistic, but it's not very interesting.

Combat in Bad Company 2 follows the same standard that Battlefield has always stuck to. Find other players and kill them. The catch, however, is that the terrain is destructible. Being harassed by a sniper in a window? Blow a hole in the side of the building to expose his sniper nest. Can't get in to plant the bomb on an objective? Collapse the building on top of it with explosives. This destruction really adds to the gameplay, as players change the landscape with every explosion. It may not be as considerable as Red Faction Guerrilla, but it's still great to see the map change as players wreak havoc.

Multiplayer is where any so-called Battlefield player should spend their time, and it has been improved upon immensely. There are four game modes: Conquest, Rush, Squad Rush, and Squad Deathmatch. Conquest is the standard Battlefield mode seen in every Battlefield game, albeit with a few changes. For example, tickets no longer seem to bleed away, making holding a position more of an access to that position's resources and spawn point than a way to keep the team from bleeding out. Rush is the assault-defend mode seen in Bad Company and several other games, although it has been changed from gold crates to M-COM stations. Attackers must take out the crates before they lose all their lives, and the defenders must hold them off. Virtually nothing has been changed with this mode. The two squad modes, Deathmatch and Rush, are small-scale battles that take place on servers with a maximum population of 16 players.

If you have made the change from Battlefield 2 to Bad Company 2, there are a number of drastic differences in the way the game plays. First off, there is no more commander. Air strikes, UAV overflights, and supply drops are all gone, although air strikes are semi-maintained with the Recon's mortar strike ability. Bad Company 2 focuses on anarchic squad-level play, with anyone in a squad being the leader and giving orders through the socialize command. Squadmates can spawn on any other squad member, and finding good spawn points for your squad can be just as essential to the team effort as killing enemies and blowing apart vehicles. You get extra points for assisting your squad, so you generally want to stay with your mates. The average is that if you are working with a squadmate, you will get double the points that you would if that person were a non-squad teammate. This makes Bad Company 2 absolutely perfect for playing with your buddies, and this is reinforced through the in-game friends system that allows you to immediately jump into a friends game on their team and squad.