The coming of summer brought with it a surprising wealth of excellent games, and we awarded no less than six Editors' Choice awards throughout the month of June. The games in question were diverse as well as numerous. Solid Snake sneaked his final mission. A revamped version of the 30 years-old Space Invaders surprised on the portables. Ryu Hayabusa slashed up a new army of demons. Sony's cute virtual golfers teed off once more. And then there were Final Fantasy Tactics A2 and Battlefield: Bad Company. Yet there are only three Game of the Month awards to go around. Our choices? Read on.



June 2008 Second Runner-up
Battlefield: Bad Company (360/PS3)

After the substantial commercial success of Halo 3, The Orange Box and Call of Duty 4, it seems like every developer wants on the first-person shooter bandwagon. But although we're seeing a number of fairly competent to downright horrid pretenders to the throne deliver gun violence from a first-person perspective, almost none of them do anything particularly new or innovative with the genre's standard gameplay conventions. Battlefield: Bad Company's approach to destructible environments, however, truly changes the way we play FPSes by offering nigh-endless avenues for attacking every objective.


Of course, this freedom extends into the multiplayer, and the single Attack/Defend mode is ideally suited to testing your ability to come up with conniving new feints and other tactical techniques. Differentiated classes also expand the competitive multiplayer experience, and the importance of class composition and team strategy quickly become apparent when venturing into the online arena.

While Bad Company doesn't completely alter the landscape of the first-person shooter genre, it breaks just enough new ground to offer a surprisingly fresh experience in both the well-worn multiplayer and somewhat static single-player departments, making it worthy of a June runner-up position.