I've been a pretty big fan of the Battlefield series of games and having played pretty much the lot of them, Battlefield 1942, Vietnam and Battlefield 2 on the P.C, then Battlefield Modern Combat on Xbox it's been great to see the series continue to take amazing graphical leaps with each new release. Battlefield 2 on the P.C was enormously addictive and the only thing that prevented me continuing to spend 20 hours or so on it each week was the release of the Xbox 360 console (I was addicted to Commander mode).

The release of the 360 saw the release of its first Battlefield game, Modern Combat, which while popular online didn't bring much, if anything really, to the table in terms of single player. Its biggest failing online was a lack of local dedicated servers (which helped make Battlefield 2 on the P.C such an enormous local success) and any sort of hosting tools and therefore many games would contain rampant team killing goons you could never kick, lack of team work and the worst thing of all, the dreaded lag from being ‘match-made' with American, and other overseas gamers.

The latest game in the series, Battlefield Bad Company, aims to correct the first issue by bringing in an actual single player campaign complete with a ‘Kelly's Heroes' and ‘Three Kings' inspired story. With multiplayer, well, there are still no dedicated hosting options and no local servers, but hopefully the broadband in this country has finally progressed enough to make lag less of an issue than it was in the past.

As mentioned, and fans will be interested to note, Bad Company contains a complete single player campaign that isn't just a dry run of the multiplayer maps loaded with bots. Taking its cues from various loveable rogue filled war movies, your character Preston Marlowe is a G.I transferred to the ‘B' Company. Yep, B stands for Bad and B Company is the home of misfits and other soldiers that have either pissed someone off, ran over the Majors dog and / or slept with his daughter and therefore wound up in B Company where nobody has to deal with them.

It's never explained just what Marlowe did to end up where he has, but things are looking up as early on in the story the lure of Mercenary gold gives everyone in B Company a reason to band together and seek their riches. Taking place over 7 maps that each take around an hour or so to complete, the single player campaign serves, not only as a training ground for the games many weapons and gadgets, but is extremely fun and enjoyable with many unique locations separate to the multiplayer maps such as a golf course and monastery topped mountain range.

While extremely enjoyable, the single player campaign isn't as hard hitting or serious as Call of Duty 4 and therefore doesn't have any single major moment of real emotional impact that will live on in your memory after finishing it. Saying that, it's not entirely fair to compare both games as they each offer an almost completely different experience. COD 4 gave us that serious story and gritty, real world - but linear - locations and Bad Company gives us a group of misfits and massive, expertly designed maps and massive battlefields complete with vehicles to tear around in.

But that's not all, and the biggest difference, the newest feature and one that creates a new game play dynamic not yet seen like this, is the latest addition to the Battlefield ‘Frostbite' engine, the environment destruction. While we've seen games that let you target enemies through walls (Perfect Dark 0) and even let you destroy walls (Red Faction) we've yet to see destruction of the level that's possible in Bad Company. Artillery strikes create massive craters, trees can be destroyed or even broken in half and buildings can be almost totally destroyed as well. I say ‘almost' because they can't be completely razed to the ground (there will always be the second story or some support structure remaining). If there's one other game that the explosions in Bad Company remind me of, I'd have to go back to the great Xbox game ‘BLACK'. If Criterion were happy to have the phrase ‘Gun Porn' associated with their game, then the phrase ‘Destruction Porn' can be readily used to describe Bad Company.

While the rampant destruction not only looks great it opens up avenues of attack, or even escape that simply haven't existed in any game to date. The downside is that it doesn't leave many places on each map to hide and in many ways favours the attacking team. Anyone hiding behind a tree or in any upstairs area of any building can quickly be flushed out, or injured as the whole side of the building that they're sniping from is obliterated right next to them. On the plus side, if you're faced with too many baddies heading your way, it doesn't take much to create an escape route by blowing a nice hole in the wall behind you. The destruction also creates plenty of flying shrapnel, cool explosions and just generally looks pretty damn great. To be honest, without the environment destruction, the single player campaign, while fun, is fun mostly due to this feature and would have been a lot less enjoyable without it.

On top of buildings flying apart around you, trees crashing down, sniper bullets whizzing past your head and attack helicopters strafing you the other thing that stands out in Bad Company is the audio. Featuring plenty of great gun sounds, environmental effects and great sounding explosions, you really feel the impact of tank rounds slamming into the walls and ground. You'll start blowing the sides of buildings apart not just to see the cool destruction, but to experience the excellent sound effects as well.

Sadly, and it must be pointed out, you'll probably be the one doing the majority of the damage because your fellow B Company squad mates are absolutely thick as a brick in the A.I department. Throughout most of the single player game they seem content to let you do pretty much everything and in one strange moment, I found myself being chased by an enemy tank which was ignoring my squad mates. As a matter of fact, they were standing in front of the thing, it was ignoring them while trying to shoot at me, and they weren't even shooting back at it either. Oh and while I'm pointing out the few things that bugged me, where is the Co-operative mode for single player? Bad Company is just screaming out for 2 or 4 player online co-op but unfortunately it's purely single player.

As you can tell though (these sore points aside), there's plenty to like in the single player campaign, but after 7 or so hours it will all be over so what's next I hear you ask? Well, in true Battlefield style the real longevity in the game is the multiplayer. Featuring 8 very cool, very large maps and one single multiplayer mode (which, yes, after playing Halo 3 and COD4 is a big surprise and a letdown) called ‘Gold Rush' you pick from a number of classes that each contain unique weapons, unlockable items and skills. Each kill will earn you points which go towards your next rank and every so often, a credit to unlock a new gun or special weapon.

While one multiplayer mode doesn't sound like a lot (and in all honestly it isn't, EA should have done better) the traditional ‘Conquest' mode is apparently on its way as a free download at some point in the future. Hopefully some of the better maps from Battlefield 2 can also be included but nothing official in that area has been announced as of yet. Gold Rush is fun and something new and the differences between the maps help keep the game play interesting. I've been favouring the Recon (Sniper) and Support class (for the extra healing points) and been unlocking all the extra gadgets to go with each of those two classes first. One of the handier ones to grab first would have to be the Artillery Strike for the Support Class.

While on many maps, the attacking team has access to a dedicated artillery gunner, the portable one is extremely handy and especially great for taking out tank drivers that don't feel the need to keep moving or snipers hiding in the forests. Some other unlockables are C4 for the Specialist class, health injectors for the Assault class, mines for the Demolition class and a very cool laser guided missile strike for the Recon class. There's also a wide selection of guns to unlock but in the months leading up to Bad Company's release, there was a fair bit of controversy online about some of the games weapons.

In what seems to be a growing trend among many games publishers to release so called ‘Collectors', ‘Gold' or ‘Special' editions of games, Bad Company rewarded purchasers of the ‘Gold edition' to receive 5 extra weapons that are only usually given out to online gamers that rank up to level 25. At least they're not simply purchasable by splurging out on MS Points I guess (yet). While this is annoying, but a sign of the times, the more annoying part of the weapon unlocks was the ‘Final Five' set of weapons.

The acquisition of these made gamers jump through a series of annoying steps such as hitting the max rank in the demo, checking your stats online, signing up for EA newsletters or by pre-ordering the game and while many of us may get to rank 25 to experience the ‘Gold edition' weapons (and by then who knows if we'll still be interested in playing any longer to enjoy them) many gamers will never be able to get any of the ‘Final Five' guns. If you didn't pre-order, play the demo, donate a litre of DNA, sign up to spam etc don't fret too much, the stats on these weapons aren't really that great so you're not missing out on anything too special. There's no achievement or anything to unlock by getting them all either. While it's good to reward the hard-core fans, it would still be cool if there were other methods available to allow everyone to experience every weapon in the game, perhaps after a few months EA can release free ‘Final Five' unlock codes for everyone?

Regardless of these sore points, which most people may not even care about, Battlefield Bad Company is definitely worth a purchase if you love First Person Shooters or the Battlefield series in general. The single player campaign is surprisingly fun and the multiplayer is true Battlefield. To get the most out of it I recommend hooking up in a squad with a group of mates, but for sheer scale and overall enjoyment it's easily the equal (and in a few ways even superior) to other recent ‘modern day' shooters.

If there's one negative thing I should mention about the multiplayer, it's that once again, there are no local servers so the match-making is pure guess work. Out of 60+ rounds I've played so far the majority of these seem to contain Americans and a handful have been so laggy I've had to quit out and start over. When everything comes together though Bad Company is an absolute blast online.