Battlefield: Bad Company 2

This mix-and-match approach helps to balance out some familiar frustrations in the early hours of play. Battlefield is a game where death comes quickly, and often silently. Wounds heal with time, but it's a slower process than the fast recharge most FPS players will now be used to.

Most of the time you won't even see where the fatal bullet came from, and experienced players can't help but dominate the map, picking off enemies with unnerving ease while you spray bullets in a futile attempt to at least cause them some damage as you go down. It's aggravating but never frustrating, thanks to a ranking system that gets you upwardly mobile with agreeable speed, and a respawn system that gets you back into the action within a few seconds.

Whereas the scenery destruction was played up in Bad Company, for this sequel it's much less showy - even though the results are far more spectacular. There's a quiet confidence in the way the game just lets you discover just how much carnage you can wreak on the environment.

Walls no longer break into large squares, but chip away slowly, revealing the iron skeleton inside. Should the damage get too much, buildings collapse convincingly; walls crumbling, the roof sliding forlornly down into the rubble. For a game with so many ways to approach bunkered enemies, it's a small yet significant improvement. There really are no safe places on this battlefield, and the result is a boot up the arse for anyone caught hanging around for easy kills.

There are some obvious grumbles, however. Graphically it often looks stunning, though the cost in frame-rate and v-sync tearing may be too much for some. Objects and textures frequently pop into existence in front of you, while the crude way that destroyed vehicles vanish after a few seconds rather spoils the verisimilitude.

Control, too, is an area that could benefit from attention come crunch time. Movement feels heavy, especially where sideways motion is concerned, and while this can be a deliberate decision to make things feel more real, the floaty jump suggests otherwise.

It's also easy to get snagged on things, or sometimes even when there's nothing there, and in a game where a few shots is the difference between life and death, anything that leaves you vulnerable feels unfair. The continued absence of a prone position falls into the same complaint bucket, especially for those playing in the sniper class. The ability to drop to the ground at the first sign of danger would save a lot of respawns, but the perfunctory ducking manoeuvre is no more up to the task than it was in the first Bad Company.

With a healthy distance to go before the game has to march onto shelves, there's plenty of time to address such relatively minor problems. It doesn't seem like Bad Company 2 is going to win over anyone who isn't already sold on the Battlefield series, but there's an easy appeal to the way DICE has refined its template over the years and on current form Bad Company 2 seems destined to be the thinking gamer's war-fetish shooter of choice for 2010.