Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is the title with which the Battlefield series finally settled in on consoles, offering something the competition couldn't do at the time: a battlefield that literally falls apart under the players' hands. The Frostbite engine allowed shooting through house walls, knocking down fences, dismantling cover with rocket launchers, and, in extreme cases, leveling an entire building, so a dug-in machine gunner stopped being a problem the moment someone removed his house. The campaign follows a squad of soldiers from a notoriously disreputable unit, whose dark humor and constant friendly ribbing give an otherwise serious war setting a lighter tone rarely seen in the genre.

The real focus, however, is the multiplayer. Players choose from four classes with distinct roles, from an assault trooper resupplying ammo through a combat engineer with anti-tank weapons to a medic with a machine gun, and together fight over control points in Conquest mode or attack a series of objectives in the tense Rush mode, which tells each map as a gradual advance. Vehicles, helicopters, and other hardware get involved in the fighting, so it comes down to crew teamwork and whether the team can cover an advance. Long sightlines, ballistics, and sprawling maps create the feeling of a real battle rather than a match in an arena.

The PlayStation 3 version ran stably and looked technically impressive especially thanks to the destruction, dust effects, and gunfire sound, which still ranks among the best-executed in the genre. At the time the game was received very warmly as a counterweight to faster, more arcade-like shooters, and many players still consider it the peak of the whole franchise. The official servers no longer run, so the online portion is a thing of the past, but the campaign and overall design remain an excellent example of how a military shooter can be built around teamwork and a changeable environment instead of scripted set pieces. That's exactly why Bad Company 2 is still referenced as the benchmark against which players measure every new entry in the series, and nostalgia for its collapsible villages and snowy valleys remains a constant topic among the franchise's fans.