For a good while there, the 'Battlefield' series was online gaming only. Back in the day, if you were playing online on a PC, 'Battlefield' was what you were playing.

Taking the reigns from the 'Unreals' and the 'Counter-Strikes', the series practically perfected the genre, what with the inclusion of vehicles, massive maps and ease of access.

It did all this a long time ago, so it's strange that it took so long for the series to debut on consoles. OK, that's a lie, 'Battlefield 2: Modern Combat' came first, but I personally never liked it and therefore it doesn't count.

So let's fast forward to the present. 'Battlefield: Bad Company' is a first-person shooter, but it does everything just a little bit differently.

The centrepiece is something very common to videogames: the humble explosion. Other games have featured explosions before, obviously, but it's not unfair to say that 'Bad Company' has perfected it.

To turn a phrase, 'Bad Company' puts the explosion in the staring role and the use of the explosion explosively changes the way you think about explosions for ever. That's explosive. Everything in Bad Company can explode or is affected by explosions: walls, enemies, tanks, trees, fences, the ground — everything explodes real good.

And it doesn't just look nice; it actually affects gameplay in a very real way. You can't hide behind a small wall if a tank is firing at you, because the wall will explode and the explosion will kill you.

Pinned down and need an escape route? Shoot something explosive at a wall and create your own door to escape through. Is a group of enemies blocking your route around a corner? No problem. Just explode that corner out of the way and kill those enemies. 'Bad Company' is proof that explosions are both fun and practical.

Besides its innovative use of the explosion, 'Bad Company' also does a few other things differently. Your weapons load out isn't the usual two gun limit we inherited from 'Halo'. Instead, 'Bad Company' handles its weapons almost like a kit.

So you get an assault rifle plus underslung grenade launcher. Or a shotgun with hand grenades. Or a sniper rifle with a pistol. There is no way to deviate from these set kits. So if you have the rifle/launcher combo and need to reload during an engagement, you can't quickly switch to another weapon. The best you can hope for is that cover is nearby for you to run to or you have enough space to fire a grenade without killing yourself.

It further changes the game tactically and takes some getting used to.

In the single player game one of the gadgets is always a healing injector. Again this changes the game tactically. No need to look for healing packs or to hide behind cover while you autoheal/recharge. Just whip out your injector and you're back to 100%. It needs a recharge after each use, but it's quite brief.

Coming from the game's background as online only, 'Bad Company' handles death in a very different manner than you may be accustomed to. As you would expect, when you die, you return to your last check point. In a twist, however, all your actions prior to your death are not reset. So anyone you killed or any buildings you exploded remain dead and exploded.

Initially I though this made the game too easy — which it does — but what it also does is remove the frustration factor that can creep into other games when you get stuck at a particularly hard point.

'Bad Company' is also the first 'Battlefield' game to feature a significant single player campaign. With a plot and everything!

You play as a recent inductee into Bad Company, a unit where the army sends all its misfits and losers. Dudes who did stupid stuff like uploading viruses to the army mainframe or who blew up an ammo depot. The unit is basically used as cannon fodder and sent on missions with a high likelihood of death.

During a mission this small group of idiots find something new to fight for: gold. In many ways the game's plot feels like an action comedy. It's certainly different to the usual revenge and save the world plots we usually get and is interesting enough that you'll keep playing to see what happens to these guys.

When you're done with that, you can jump into the meat of the game: the multiplayer. It's called Gold Rush and is slightly different from the Conquest mode that 'Battlefield' was popular for.

The teams are assigned to attacker or defender roles. The attacking team has to blow up two gold crates that the defending team must... defend. If the defenders can drain the attacking team's respawn meter, then they win. If the attackers can get both gold crates, they boost their respawn meter and push the defenders back to another set of gold crates and they keep doing that until they destroy all the crates on the map.

Like everything else in 'Bad Company', the presentation is explosive. The game has a smart visual design with very animated and expressive characters, which works well for the action/comedy plot. The explosions are, of course, explosive and when they happen there are flames, debris and dust to obscure your vision.

The game's soundtrack is equally engaging. The massive explosions will threaten your hearing and the gun reports aren't far behind. The musical soundtrack seesaws between Michael Bay epic and Marx brothers cheesy, but all in a good way.

'Bad Company' is a bit different, sure, but I like that it toys with your first-person shooter expectations. It changes just enough to stand out, but not so much that it's alienating. The one-two combo of its excellent single player campaign and brilliant online play makes 'Bad Company' easy to enjoy.

It looks explosive, has tons of cool military hardware, and works great regardless of whether you play alone or with a few mates. In a word, 'Bad Company' is simply explosive.