What’s the best way to stop a tank in its caterpillar tracks? Well, that all depends on what you mean by ‘best’. If you want to be absolutely sure of stopping it, and of allowing absolutely no escape for anyone inside, then your best option is to call in some sort of air unit or artillery strike. But resources are scarce during times of war and such a strike might seem excessive. It might be more efficient to plant a C4 charge on its shiny metal ass then run away with your fingers in your ears. But this, of course, carries the risk of getting squished by a reversing tank, which is almost as embarrassing as it is fatal. A third, and indeed popular, option would be to send a couple of rocket-propelled grenades its way. Not too much personal risk and not too much overkill – it’s the way Goldilocks would have dealt with a tank.

Each of these three methods has its own advantages and disadvantages and all, if employed correctly, will work. But none of these is the best way to stop a tank. The best way to stop a tank is to wait for it to approach a bridge then, at just the right moment, blow a hole in the bridge so that the tank plummets turret-first into the river below. This will do hardly any damage to the tank, and is unlikely to hurt anyone inside it, but it will be deeply humiliating for them and will make you laugh so hard you’ll get all flustered and out of breath, and will probably end up getting shot, but you won’t care.

We confess we’ve never done this ourselves, but we did see it done and we did hear manic, hysterical laughter drifting across the online no-man’s-land between here and Sweden (we’re pretty sure he was laughing in Swedish). And we had a fair old chuckle about it ourselves. That, comrades, is the best way to stop a tank and, what’s more, it also tells you all you need to know about the best way to wage war – make it fun.

Yeah, you can keep your, "In war, there are no unwounded soldiers", and you can stick your, "We make war that we may live in peace" up your rear-guard action, mate. Bollocks do we! We make war because it’s fun and because explosions are cool. That’s the philosophy behind Battlefield: Bad Company anyway.

It’s a stark contrast to Call Of Duty 4’s philosophy, that’s for sure. COD 4 pushed home the message that death is an inevitable consequence of war, by forcing you to experience two certain deaths in first-person during its single-player campaign. This was a brave move, and one that proved pretty effective, but we couldn’t help feeling that it jarred somewhat against the fact that the point of Call Of Duty is to make war as entertaining as humanly possible. That’s the point of Bad Company, too, but Bad Company isn’t embarrassed to admit that it’s out to make fun of war, and to make fun out of war.

So, explosions, guns, tanks, helicopters, shouting, running around, breaking things, swearing like a trooper – all in. Permanent death, blood, historical relevance, comradeship, bonding, psychological torment, physical pain, ponderings on the futility of war – all out. Oddly though, while it doesn’t make any obvious attempts to be realistic or believable, Bad Company does re-create certain aspects of warfare very convincingly, especially in online multiplayer. Real-life veterans often talk about the chaos of war, of being overwhelmed by distortion and mess, both visual and audible, and in this particular department Bad Company might be about the strongest game ever made. You don’t feel as vulnerable as you do in Call Of Duty, but you do get persistent chaos that just about manages to stop short of total anarchy. You’ve barely got a handle on what’s going on, but you know there’s definitely a point to it. It’s not happened by accident either. Battlefield’s online experience has been very skilfully balanced. You have the freedom to play in your own style and licence to mess about, but you’re also given a very clear, very simple sense of purpose.

And this applies to all of Bad Company’s online game types… all one of them. One? Yes, just one. It’s called Gold Rush and, as we say, it’s very, very good. But Bad Company is unlikely to sustain long play sessions without more variety. EA has promised Battlefield’s classic Conquest mode as a free download soon after launch, but we’re here to review nothing more and nothing less than what you get when you hand over your dosh. Frankly, one online game mode in a title so focused on multiplayer just isn’t enough. It might be some compensation that DICE has put a lot of effort into the single-player game, filling it out with a decent story, some likeable characters and a variety of scenarios, but it’s still not really all that good, feeling like a pretty generic squad shooter when compared to the all-out war of multiplayer. To be honest, we’d rather have seen the return of Hotswapping.

Gavin Mackenzie