YMMV / Battlefield: Bad Company

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The Japanese really did have an M1 Garand knockoff. It just wasn't actually issued in any capacity; the wartime Japanese industry was too damaged by how badly the war was going for them to iron out the many, many issues, and they'd only made enough parts for about 250 of them, only half of which were assembled before the war ended and most of them were dumped in the sea. It also didn't load with en bloc clips like the regular Garand, since the en bloc clip design flatly refused to work with their standard rifle cartridge.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Many people got through Bad Company 2's entire campaign only with the XM8/AN-94 loadout, occasionally switching one of them for an RPG or a sniper rifle.
  • Multiplayer's not much better. Everyone uses the AN-94, M60, and GOL, all with Magnum ammo so they're capable of a One-Hit Kill at pretty much any range. The XM8 + Under-barrel Shotgun is also a very powerful and easy combination to use. Blam the first person you see with the shotgun and instantly switch to the XM8 to spray and pray anyone else.
• Complete Monster: Colonel Arkady Kirilenko, from the second game, is one of the leading officers in Russia's conquest of the world and the head of a project to create a weapon of mass destruction, called the Scalar Weapon. Leading his forces in spreading death and destruction all over the world, killing many, Arkady uses Agent Aguire's anger at the US, for sending his father to die, to help him find the final piece of the Scalar Weapon, after which he quickly disposes of him. Finishing his weapon, Arkady first tested it on US forces in the Colombian city of Medellin, further destroying the city, as well as killing all US troops there and some of his own men. Satisfied with the results, Arkady tries to fly this weapon to the US, so that he could use it there in an attempt to destroy part of the country, so that America would be easily invaded and annihilated by Russian forces.
• Even Better Sequel: Bad Company 2, at least for the multiplayer. The campaign is more Contested Sequel territory, due to both being more linear and abandoning the Lighter and Softer tone that set it apart from its primary competitor.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The M60 in Bad Company 2. Even with its low rate of fire, its damage output at all ranges is still unrivaled by any other gun in the game. So overpowered that it and the 1911 got nerfed in the first major update.
  • The Apache gunship, especially when the pilot zooms around in circles spitting out rockets, getting tons of kills without even having to aim.
• Good Bad Bugs: There was a bug which made almost all sound effects not play for a few moments in-game, especially when too many explosions or the like occurred at once near the player character. This gave an impression of the player character undergoing Shell-Shock Silence.
• Harsher in Hindsight: DICE's constant mockery of the Modern Warfare series for ditching dedicated servers turned rather hypocritical after the launch of Bad Company 2, when the servers DICE provided for the consoles couldn't handle the traffic load.
  • DICE also mocked MW2's lack of mod support and hyped up Battlefield's promised mod support a great deal. Turns out, DICE didn't added mod support to their franchise either. It was explained in an interview that this was due to limitations of the Frostbite engine, which was still a better explanation than Infinity Ward's "We want you to play the game the way we made it".
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Book Ends for Bad Company 2 that show Russia's territory expanding are extremely unnerving. This probably isn't helped by the fact that their territory looks a lot like blood, seeping over the globe.
  • The Scalar. Jeez...
• Retroactive Recognition: Private Preston Marlowe is voiced by David Menken, who later on would become more well-known for voicing Malos in Xenoblade Chronicles 2.
• Player Punch: Flynn is shot down for the second (and final) time, just minutes after your squad rescues him and seconds after his Gunship Rescue moment.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Oh boy, where to begin?
  • The tracer can lock on to any kind of vehicle, including the Apache. However, the Apache can fire a massive stream of rockets that will push back into hiding any recon class it doesnt kill outright. The Scrappy Mechanic comes in from the fact that even if you manage to successfully tag the Apache, it can drop countermeasure flares that nullify the effect of the tracer before anyone can even lock on. The only way to destroy it from the ground would be to fire at it yourself, which is about as easy as hitting a jet with a slingshot. For a while it was completely possible to win the match on your own by flying around the enemies' spawn spamming rockets.
  • In the Vietnam expansion, machine guns fired from the boats can inflict more damage than similar weapons used in the vanilla game.
• That One Level: Defending the hut in "No One Gets Left Behind" from BC2 is one of the most painful experiences in the entire game, primarily because of what the game chooses to arm you with. The level starts with you losing all your weapons except a pistol, though there is a weapons crate along the path so you can gear up with what you want, until you actually get to the hut, at which point the game decides, for ranges at which an assault rifle with an ACOG has easily sufficed, you need a bolt-action sniper rifle - and not just any bolt-action sniper rifle, but the biggest, strongest, but also slowest of them all, the M95 Barrett. The section quickly becomes infuriating for all the wrong reasons, as you are looking at two seconds minimum between each shot (more when you factor in the need to actually aim) and six to reload after every 5 shots, which is a very bad combination with the fact that your cover will be quickly chipped away by the enemy's much faster return fire. You do have help from Sweetwater with a much more sensible semi-automatic sniper rifle, but good luck getting him to do much work. The only way to make the section tolerable is grabbing two assault rifles from the crate and having whichever one you like less equipped before triggering the cutscene so that it's the one that gets replaced with the Barrett.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Since the game was programmed with console audiences in mind, there's a lot of changes the Battlefield 2 PC community found annoying:
  • In multiplayer, all characters now have bigger hitboxes than in the previous games, to make it easier for gamepad users to connect their shots (compared with Battlefield 2, which had smaller hitboxes). Unfortunately, this had the side effect of mouse using PC players being able to kill at incredible distances, sometimes around corners, and caused the infamous "sticky bullet" glitch.
  • Gunships, which were massive Game Breakers in BF2, were nerfed and had their TV missiles removed, armor weakened, and can now take damage from any kind of weapon.
• Tough Act to Follow: Although debates will rage on which ‘’Battlefield’’ had the best multiplayer, Both Bad Company games have the best-received campaigns in the entire series, with a good number of fans still clamoring for a third game on this basis alone. The later Battlefield campaigns are nowhere near as popular, with common criticisms towards them being they lacked the comedic charm of Bad Company and generally tried too hard to copy its competitors with more cliched stories. The only campaign that comes close to matching the popularity of Bad Company's was the War Stories of Battlefield 1, and even then it's hard to compare.