Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - Onslaught Review
Bot summer nights.
Version tested: Xbox 360
A student banquet: that's what this premium downloadable content pack offers to long-standing Bad Company 2 players. It's when you can't afford to go to the supermarket, having splurged your spending money on cheap booze and ironic t-shirts, so you use up whatever leftovers and ingredients you have lingering in the fridge, mix them together in a slightly different way and bung it all in the oven. The result may stop your stomach rumbling, but it'll never delight the palate.
Now, I'm certainly not insinuating that DICE can't even afford to pick up a giant sack of Lidl pasta, but there's no mistaking the familiar flavours being reheated here. From the maps to the mechanics of this new co-operative mode, it's refried beans all the way.
Playable by up to four players, Onslaught tasks you with steaming into enemy territory and holding key map points. Once an objective is cleared, you move on to the next. Capture all the objectives and you win. Yay. Meanwhile, the game is throwing everything it can at you to stop you in your tracks. Tanks, attack choppers, mounted machine guns, snipers: they're all ready to roll into view (or not, in the case of those pesky snipers) and put you in the ground.
As long as one team member remains alive, the game continues. Should you all die at the same time, it's game over, and you have to restart from the very beginning. If you play solo, you get infinite lives but basically have absolutely no chance of success. This is very much a four-player affair, and even tackling the game in a pair means the odds are stacked against you.

One of the advantages of bots: they think nothing of seeing a hedge riding a quadbike.
Thankfully, you'll carry over whatever equipment and weapon unlocks you've earned in the competitive multiplayer mode, but that trade doesn't work in reverse. If you were hoping for a quick way to boost a few ranks against easy-level AI foes in Onslaught before heading back into the online fray against your friends, you're out of luck.
As with most online shooters, the experience varies hugely depending on the quality of the other players. Find yourself with a bunch of muppets who can't seem to shake the idea of running around shooting at everything that moves, and it's agony. Team up with efficient, strategically minded soldiers and it's a potent example of everything that makes Bad Company 2 so great. Protecting your brothers in arms, sharing ammo packs, reviving fallen allies as enemies encroach from all sides, surviving by the skin of your teeth as you react to each new threat with near supernatural ferocity... Yes, it's still an amazing feeling.

As familiar as the maps are, they're still capable of serving up eye-watering moments of destruction.
It's also very familiar. You'll be advancing down the well-trodden paths of Valparaiso, Atacama Desert, Isla Innocentes and Nelson Bay once again, and while these are undoubtedly superb multiplayer maps, they're also worn thin by three months of competitive play. Admittedly, they have been given a minor tweak for Onslaught, but switching the lighting from night to day doesn't make any real difference to maps most players will be able to navigate blindfolded.
There are no new weapons or vehicles added to the layouts, and no new pathways to exploit, which probably explains why this 800 Microsoft Point download (£7.19 on PSN) clocks in at just under 1MB in size. It's possible that the guts of Onslaught were already served up in the two recent and sizeable multiplayer updates, but even so - there really is no new material here.
Even the way Onslaught is structured feels like a remix rather than a whole new song. It's basically Rush crossed with Conquest, as you push forward towards an enemy stronghold and then play Capture the Flag for a few minutes while the timer ticks down and the flag rolls up. These are tried and trusted design choices, but they never combine to justify the overwhelming panic that the word "onslaught" promises.
For one thing, you're the ones doing the onslaughting, which feels upside down. If I'm playing something called Onslaught, I want my back to the wall, I want impossible odds and I want to know that my survival comes from basic combat skill, not just the fact that I've played the map 500 times before and know exactly where to hide.
The Halo Firefight and Gears of War Horde template may soon be as overexposed as Capture the Flag, but the prospect of playing a "last stand" scenario with the power of the Frostbite engine's environmental destruction is incredibly appealing. Knowing that your fortress is being chipped away with each explosion, forced to react to attacks from all sides - Onslaught only taps into that buttock-clenching primordial defence impulse for those brief flag-capturing stand-offs before you're on the move again, and that's a shame. You can already experience the hunt-and-evade thrill against live human opponents, so swapping them for the more predictable challenge of AI bots doesn't elevate the formula at all.

If Santa won't come out, the US Marines are going in, Waco-style.
That's not to say Onslaught isn't tough. Hardcore difficulty is incredibly punishing, with your health halved, your guns weakened and your enemies apparently upgraded with bulletproof heads. It's a cheap way of cranking up the challenge, and victory comes just as much from stubborn determination rather than the application of superior tactical co-operation.
The absence of something like Left 4 Dead's AI Director is sorely felt. While the combat is as muscular as always on a moment-to-moment basis, it lacks the sadistic sense of evolving shape and pace that Valve has injected into co-operative play. Making the gameplay peak and trough depending on how the participants are playing, rather than which bit of the map they've reached, would go a long way to making Onslaught feel more essential, more alive.

It's different because it's night time, you see.
Bot-bashing has long been a part of Battlefield's heritage, of course, so it's hard to blame DICE for wanting to revive the tradition for console gamers new to the series. It's also hard to forgive the decision to price such a slim addition to the game so highly, especially since juggling existing game assets to come up with new twists is the sort of thing that used to be supplied for free by the mod community.
That's not to say that DICE and EA aren't perfectly entitled to charge money for new menu items, or that every DLC offering should reinvent the wheel. Bad Company 2 remains a superb shooter (if still rather borked by that last patch), but having gorged on it for three months we need something more interesting than second-hand spaghetti bolognese if we're expected to pick up the tab.
6 / 10
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Comments (42) Latest comment 1 year ago
Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!
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Oh, and thanks for reminding me to go back and play some L4D. Its been a while.
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Where do you see that? This is associated with the main Bad Company 2 game in our database, which got 9...
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What makes it worse is that the gameplay is great, ive never gotten bored of an online shooter so fast with such great gameplay.
Its odd, years later im still playing warhawk a ton, I still play KZ2 every once in a while, its beucase they got a few good map packs and so the games, especially warhawk with variations on each map which are well made, have so much choice.
You dont get that with this game, and becuase of this it all gets boring very fast.
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on hardcore though it's far more difficult but rather then being tense and tactical it's more a war of attrition.
with friends i'd recommend it otherwise it's not really good value at over 7 quid. and £14 to unlock all the weapons upgrades ect?!! you must be mad or rich to pay that.
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Seems that DICE have ploughed it's resources into MoH which boggles my mind as it just seems like an inferior BC2.
We definitely could use some new maps or the current maps working for both modes at the very least.
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Tip: use the excellent prefer/avoid rating for other players ( on xbox live ) and soon you're rid of those spawn-campers, base-rapers (who comes up with those terms?) and c4 bombing runs. Nothing wrong with that, just not the kind of tactics that I prefer.
Awesome game, looking forward to new maps though.
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This is even less interesting. And over-priced. Pass.
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I've found Hard to be just right in terms of difficulty for me.
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this really needs some new maps now though and i hope they add them soon.....
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Yes there is! The massive missile gun boat boss thing on one of the levels, the new humvee, the new buggees and then theres the new stationary turrets.
All in all, me and my 3 friends are getting good value out of it, though I would have rather paid for some new map packs.
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I suggest you give the maps a go on Hard or Hardcore... Nails.
Also, jmcflash +1 - There are loads of new weapons... They even mention it in the release notes...
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Thanks for the recommendation so, i'll put it on my "to buy" list. I'll stick with BF 1 for a while anyway (started online with it just last week), the servers are suprisingly busy still and it'll give BC2 a chnce to come down in price too.
Who knows, if DICE ever release BC 1 maps for it i might even stand a chance
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You silly cunt.
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I love BC 2! I freakin love it!
But im tired of playin the same old maps on my pc.
Is that so hard to understand.
If they wanna overthrow MW 2 they have to try harder
cuz this really annoys.
And by the way: Not offering this package for pc players ia criminal act.
I cant believe they do this to us....pc gamers...we made battlefield what it is today.
Assholes....
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You're right but DICE's whole approach to DLC for BC2 just rings seven bells of 'FAIL' for me. They're forcing everyone who has the game to download a patch and have oodles of fluff and bubble sat locked on their hard drives. I love BC2 as it is and don't care much for getting onslaught or the various class packs, yet they're still sat on my hard drive taking up space. Where's the sense in that?
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6/10 is a joke, yes it uses old maps (which you didn't stop yapping on about in the review) but it is FUN! play it on hardcore with a few friends and it really is amazing! knocks spots off halo odst's firefight mode.
And the new DLC isn't a 1mb file, multiplayer update 2 was onslaught, this was 450mb.
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I'm also not surprised in the least that this is a complete rip-off. The so-called VIP content has been a joke, the paid-for DLCs have been a joke, and I've just about lost all interest in the game, now. How many more times are they going to try and sell us the same fucking maps (which are already on the disc) with some spawn points moved around?
And the biggest tragedy is that I'm starting to think I might consider paying 1200MSP for a MW2-style map pack for Bad Company 2...
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It is darn near impossible to play alone on anything but the lowest difficulty setting. If you try to play solo, you will find you run out of ammo if you are any class other than assault, which is a right royal pain in the rear.
The few games I have had on Onslaught that have actually worked have been good fun. Just a shame that it has proved near impossible to make up a private four player game that doesn't crash. £7 for broken content at the moment, which leaves a bitter taste.
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