The whole of America is about to come under one of the largest terrorist attacks of all time, the Russians are behind it and the only people who can save the states is a small company of heroes. No we’re not talking about a low budget made for TV movie but rather than plot of Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Any modern FPS title is going to draw comparisons with the beast that is Modern Warfare 2 so in the battle of the sequels, how does Bad Company 2 do?

PC gamers have already had quite a bit of Battlefield to play with. With settings ranging from World War 1 all the way up to the future, but these have always been multiplayer only titles. Bad Company 2 marks the franchise’s first foray into a story driven single player campaign on the PC.

Jumping straight into Bad Company 2 you instantly get a sense of familiarity about the game. The gimmick here is the destructible environments. Shooting a house with a missile launcher will cause part of the house to explode in a cloud of dust and bricks and it's a pretty powerful feeling and impressive visual experience. What feels like another tacked on addition to a tired genre quickly becomes a very integral game mechanic.

You quickly get a feel of the characters within your squad – sure, they feel flat and one dimensional, but that helps the game manage humour without becoming too dark. Modern Warfare 2 tried to take itself seriously where as Bad Company 2 takes the narrative and manages to produce a game that becomes predictable but not painfully boring, a trap many war games easily fall into.

As you progress through the levels you can pick up guns which enemies drop, in each level there is normally a couple of unique weapons which you can find – once you’ve picked up the weapon it becomes accessible within weapons creates that are scattered around the maps. There are a good number of guns, and the weapons you choose to use very much define the type of gameplay you’ll be experience, be it taking out your enemies from afar with a sniper rifle or blowing them into tiny little pieces with a bazooka.

The levels have been designed to sometimes force you into using different weapons so you can’t just snipe your way through the entire game but at other times going straight in and shooting up the place would result in almost certain death. It’s this level design that really takes the Bad Company 2 gameplay and gives it that little extra kick that it needed.

The main disappointment is the very linear progression which when combined with the very one dimensional characters gives the game that low budget movie feel. A lot of the time it feels like a wasted opportunities. For example, a staple Battlefield vehicle, the helicopter, has been omitted from the single player game and the only real reason is because the small, linear scenarios presenting in the single player game simply don't have the scale for flying vehicles.

Even with a fairly lengthy single player campaign the main draw for Bad Company 2 is the multiplayer, it will be very familiar to previous Battlefield players while introducing a number of new features that make a sizeable impact to the way the action plays out.

In addition to the standard Conquest mode in which your team has to hold the majority of points until the timer runs out, Bad Company 2 introduces Rush mode. Rush pits two teams against each other on a growing map – one side is the attackers and one side is the defenders, the attackers goal is to blow up the defenders base – each time the attackers succeed the defenders are pushed back until their ultimate defeat. If the attackers fail to destroy the defenders within a defined time period then the defenders take the round. Think Counterstrike, but with multiple bomb sites and buildings that blow up around you.

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