Bad Company 2 vs. Call of Duty: Black Ops

So I'm making pretty decent progress on Call of Duty: Black Ops, and I thought it was worth a blog post of comparison. Here are my thoughts:

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is way more playable. I think the game plays more clearly, the animations and enemy AI are far superior, and the lighting design is much less sinister and a bit more realistic. The graphics are a bit better all around, I'd say too. I'm really not sure if it's the graphical quality or the lack of realism from the enemy bots in the single player campaign that make the difference.

The storyline of both games is pretty intriguing, but Call of Duty is so over the top (okay, Bad Company 2 is pretty far over the top, but Call of Duty goes a little farther) with the campaign mode that it's a bit hard to believe. The characters aren't nearly as likeable as bad company 2, and there is absolutely zero humor involved. That said, I think both storylines would make good movies, I just don't want to go have a beer with any of the dudes from Call of Duty yet, that's all.

There are some gameplay problems in black ops...it took me an hour or so to figure out I was supposed to knock over a damn barrel of napalm to stop some soldiers from spawning. They should have been marked or something. I feel that Bad Company 2 executed a bit better on the gameplay for the single player campaign.

All in all, the set pieces are a little smaller and more intimate in black ops (so far), excluding blowing up a Soviet soyuz rocket. This isn't such a fair comparison because I would expect black ops to actually be a bit more intimate and low key than hollywood theatrics.

To be fair, there were some decent geometry problems and the animations of the character models in Bad Company 2 weren't super detailed, but I encountered all of those problems in the multiplayer component. I haven't tried the multiplayer side of black ops yet, and I've heard that the action REALLY lies in multiplayer with Call of Duty games, so maybe I'll amend this post after I've played around with that.

I like that both games seem to spit out trophies left and right :).

If I had to put a number on a scale of 10 for these games compared to the games i played in 2010, I'd give Bad Company 2 a 10/10, and Black Ops so far about an 9/10.

The end.