Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 brought something to the Xbox 360 that rival shooters couldn't offer: a battlefield you could shoot to pieces. It took the Frostbite engine only a few rocket rounds to turn a brick house sheltering a sniper into a pile of rubble, shifting the entire tactical picture of the map. The campaign follows a squad from the Bad Company unit, who with a hefty dose of detachment and barroom humor shoot their way from South American jungle to snow-covered mountains, and serves mainly as a taste of what the player would then experience on the servers.

The real focus, though, is multiplayer. Four classes with their own gear and unlocks, a broad vehicle roster from jeeps to armored transports to helicopters, and two main modes: classic conquest and, above all, Rush, where attackers gradually destroy radio stations while defenders fall back layer by layer across the map. Rush combined with destruction in particular created situations that couldn't be scripted in advance, because the defense would literally crumble underfoot. The game rewarded teamwork, healing, and vehicle repair far more than solo running-and-gunning, giving patient players points for support roles too.

Reception was very good, and Bad Company 2 stayed on the community's radar on Xbox Live for years, partly because it was the most accessible Battlefield of its time. The genre's influence is still visible today: environmental destruction became the argument the series used to set itself apart from the competition, and plenty of later shooters drew on it. Returning to it today reveals the older graphics and longer stretches on foot, but the feel of the weapons and ballistics, the sound design, and the atmosphere of sprawling battlefields with flying debris age surprisingly well. It's a game that's a reminder that big battles work even without constant hand-holding. Bad Company 2's main achievement remains that the difference between it and the competition wasn't cosmetic but fundamental: while elsewhere the map plays out the same way every time, here each match gradually turned into a different battlefield, because the players themselves rebuilt it by force.