Battlefield: Bad Company 2- Zero Dark Thirty

“Go? Go where? Home? There won’t be a home! Won’t be anything! Sweetwater…that’s it? I guess you weren’t really cut out for that special ops after all! The shit hits the fan and you want out! Sarge, you just gonna lay down? I see. Fine, I’ll go my fucking self!” – Preston Marlowe

The level starts in a jungle, near an unnamed city. Bravo-Two Charlie moves out towards a city after discovering from a Russian patrol that Kirilenko was in the harbor, passing a supply crate on the right when the Scalar Weapon begins its detonation sequence, making the same noise heard earlier in Operation Aurora. The squad comes up on a group of Militia defending the area, with a shielded KORD emplacement. They engage the enemy soldiers and once they are down, the squad advances through the city, but are ambushed by another shielded HMG and an RPG soldier on a cream-coloured building to the left of the HMG, along with a couple of soldiers on the ground. Marlowe kills them off, and detonates an explosive barrel near the HMG’s house to bring it down. After the squad advances into a marketplace, they fight off an ambush and fall under heavy fire from enemy mortars. The mortar eventually gives up after they reach the canal. After exiting the tunnel, Bad Company find a squad of Russian soldiers waiting to ambush the squad on the other side of the canal. Once they are taken out, the squad crosses the rushing water over the debris cluttering it and advances into the final part of the canal. Upon reaching the end, the Scalar Weapon detonates, obliterating the US and Russian forces by disabling their electronics. Haggard and Sweetwater nearly give up after seeing the power of the weapon, but with Redford’s help, Preston manages to convince them to finish the job, given that they are the only people left to prevent Kirilenko from detonating the Scalar weapon over the US, obliterating the power grid and all forms of communications.

• The final missions to Battlefield: Bad Company 2 are very short in length and as such, have very few screenshots: I was more interested in shooting down the bad guys and making my way towards the end of the game at this point. The next post will discuss the final two missions in the game, as I don’t have very many pictures for them, either.

• Having a light machine gun with the same scope as the XM8 is a luxury that couples the large magazine size of the LMG with the functional range of the assault rifle, at the expense of a grenade launcher. However, the enemies are at tight quarters here, and pairing any weapon with a shotgun would be most effective here.

• Care must be taken to ensure that one doesn’t rush into enemy ambushes: the closed nature of the cityscape means that concealed enemy forces could pin down Marlowe. Instead, use long-range fire and well-thrown grenades to clear the path ahead.

• The USAS-12 Shotgun is a gas-operated, magazine fed automatic shotgun offering unmatched performance at close ranges and is first found in Snowblind. After beating the campaign, going through earlier missions and equipping this gun via the supply crates is a brilliant means of creating total chaos.

• Believe it or not, the Type-88 rifle excels in the canals, allowing one to pick off distant forces before they can close in on one’s position. Paired with any assault rifle, the last phase of the mission simply involves shredding anything between Bad Company and the Scalar Weapon, although the outcome of the mission means there isn’t any real rush to reach the end.

The eleventh mission in Bad Company 2 takes place at close quarters; I had enjoyed a homemade burger and oven fries prior to starting this mission on a Sunday afternoon. By this point, I’ve more or less stopped playing the game at my friend’s place, instead, picking the game up from the beginning after acquiring on the Steam Sale. At the time of writing, I’ve played through multiplayer on a few occasions, although the multiplayer is not quite as fun as those of science-fiction shooters like Halo 2 and Tribes: Ascend. Nonetheless, this is a discussion about the single player, so I’ll stick to that. While this is a close-quarters mission, I’ve found that the XM8 and Type-88 still work wonders on this mission, although the close quarters might make a LMG or shotgun with slugs a useful alternative to the Type-88. Zero Dark Thirty is one of the most hectic missions in the game, with near-nonstop combat that emptied my magazines very rapidly.