Battlefield is going back to Vietnam, this time for a downloadable expansion to the well-received first-person shooter Bad Company 2. The add-on, due out this Winter for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, delivers four new maps, a rematch of sorts between the North Vietnamese army and the United States, and a change in the weapon and vehicle options to match the setting. I got my first taste of this huge expansion at an EA press event on the eve of the Tokyo Game Show.

If you've played Battlefield: Bad Company 2 before, then you know exactly what to expect out of the Vietnam expansion. The base game remains unchanged. Sure, you get different tools of destruction and new achievements or trophies to unlock, but the modes and basic approach to a shooter follow the guidebook laid out by Bad Company 2's multiplayer. That means a focus on team play, some objective based gaming, and wide open maps filled with destructible buildings and plenty of vehicles. Squint your eyes a bit while playing the Vietnam expansion and you can imagine you're still playing the original base game.



That, however, would be missing the point. Vietnam is the perfect setting to show off the power of DICE's Frostbite engine. Little straw huts crumble under the might of tank shells. The landscape is lush with trees and shrubs, all of which can be mowed down through machine gun fire. When making a game that puts such an emphasis on destruction, Vietnam is the ideal locale.

I got to play a Conquest game on a map called Phu Bai Valley. Here, each side was fighting over three locations of interest while doing their best to take out the opposition. Helicopters and tanks were in heavy rotation, though I also found that snipers have a ton of places to hide amidst the trees and huts. My favorite moment came when I crashed a helicopter into an armored vehicle, hopping out just before impact. That was a pretty great explosion.

I only got to play a couple of rounds, but what I played was fun. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is still a fantastic looking and handling game and this download is going to do a nice job of reminding everyone of just that. New maps are always a welcome addition to games with such a heavy emphasis on multiplayer modes, but this download is going well beyond simply adding new places to fight. It flips the script and puts a fresh face on a game that millions have already tried.

My quick impressions thus far tell me that fans are going to eat this expansion up. If you've grown tired of the Bad Company 2 gameplay, this won't do a ton to get you excited again as the core isn't changing. That said, this is a great way to reinvigorate the community during the holiday flood of new games