Take a deep breath, and let it out. It’s a beautiful day. Birds are singing. The jungle is lush. The water is warm. Not a gator for miles. Why did you even bring that USAS-12 fully automatic shotgun, anyway?

The answer comes suddenly as the foliage around you explodes into the air – Tank shell? Mortar round? Just a really freaking big machine gun? No time to find out. You dive behind cover, scoping in your weapon, searching desperately for a target. Enemy soldiers begin to appear through holes in the jungle undergrowth, all of them heavily armed, all of them gunning for you. Smoke billows into the air obscuring your vision, the sound of screaming and weapons fire filling your ears. Getting a precise shot is all but impossible. Panic-laced adrenaline is scorching through your veins.

Good thing you brought that shotgun, after all.

Intense, adrenaline packed, and drop dead gorgeous – that’s Battlefield: Bad Company 2. A modern military shooter in a vein similar to the Modern Warfare games, BC2 sports an enjoyable single-player campaign, expansive and progressive multiplayer, and some of the best visuals and terrain deformation I’ve seen in a game.

First, the single player. The game picks up where the previous Bad Company episode left off. Or so I gather, anyway – the first game wasn’t released for PC, and therefore I spurned it.

You play as Preston Marlowe, Bad Company’s all purpose man. Joining you are Sarge, Haggard, and Sweetwater (i.e., Fearless but Weary Leader, Trigger Happy Redneck, and … Geeky Tech with a Huge Machine Gun. Way to buck cliche, EA).

Bad Company is a special operations unit assigned the grandiose mission of preventing World War III. They aren’t really told this, of course. Video game military intelligences never reveal that kind of information until after the nukes are in the air. But it’s clear that the baddies are up to something unfortunate, so it’s headshot time.

The campaign is thoroughly enjoyable, taking you through a variety of environments and keeping the pace going strong with a good mix of boots on the ground and vehicular menslaughter (most of the vehicle sections are on rails, but on a couple of occasions you’re given the controls. Both variations are well done and fun to play.)

The story isn’t anything particularly groundbreaking – an experimental WWII weapon is being sought after by the Russians who want to use it against the U.S., and no points for guessing who gets to put a stop to that bag o’ shenanigans. It does serve to keep the experience moving, however, and it’s well done for what it is.

Your teammates are, by and large, useless. They’ll take cover and spray their weapons in the general direction of the enemy, but you’ll find yourself taking 90 percent of the kill shots. Luckily, they make up for this by being extremely entertaining. Haggard and Sweetwater in particular have dialogue sequences which forced me to pause the game in order to avoid getting blown to bits while ROFLing.

And yes, I did just say ROFLing. Pray I don’t say it any further.

The game also takes a few direct jabs at Modern Warfare 2, which I found particularly amusing, in my dark sadistic and biased way.

You’ll gain access to new weapons, work through varied environments with unique challenges, and ultimately wrap things up with a satisfying, if open-ended, conclusion. The whole thing takes about eight hours – just about right.

Normally, being a story focused, single-player sort of a fellow, I wouldn’t bother much about multiplayer. But as it’s one of the main selling points of Bad Company 2, I put it through a few of its paces.

It’s quite entertaining. There are a few different game modes to choose from – I spent the most time with ‘Rush.’ It’s an attack/defend game mode with multiple checkpoints – defenders try to keep attackers from capturing two M-COM stations (no idea what M-COM stands for, but I found it entertaining to believe that both M’s stood for Mastodon). If the defenders fail, they’ll fall back to the next checkpoint, and so on and so forth until the attacking team captures all the checkpoints, or until…they don’t.

There’s also Conquest (territory control with lots of room for improvisation) and deathmatch modes to choose from.

All this is complicated by the destructible environment. A low wall or doorway that might protect you in other games is just a rookie mistake waiting to happen. I quickly learned that hiding in buildings is no way to evade tanks, or even a well placed grenade. Walls distintegrate, vehicles explode, bodies fly – all in glorious plumes of smoke, flame and shrapnel. It’s immersive, to say the least, and downright terrifying if you aren’t expecting it.

It’s fast-paced and progressive. Each accomplishment (kills, mostly) nets you points toward unlocking new weapons and gadgets. It’s also immensely more satisfying to master than the single-player campaign. Where the campaign was a wild ride, the multiplayer is a much more challenging and cerebral experience that takes time to master, but pays off when you do.

Technically, the game is fantastic. A few glitches, mostly involving clipping issues, don’t do much to mar the beauty of the graphics engine. The character modeling and animations, in particular, are among the best I’ve seen in a game. Weapons are solid and loud, the destructible environments are believable and add a level of unpredictability to both the single and multiplayer sides of the game.

Also appreciated are the multiple enhancements the PC version of the game received over its console counterparts. Unlocked frame rates, enhanced graphics options, optimized menus, and sharpened controls are just a few of the tweaks the PC release received. It’s a beautiful thing to see a developer giving appropriate attention to gaming’s strongest platform instead of just slapping a Games for Windows sticker on the box and hoping people won’t notice (hint: people notice).

Team and enemy AI is probably the game’s weakest point – I’ve already discussed your teammates, but the enemies suffer from a lack of functioning gray matter as well. This is mitigated somewhat by the fact that most encounters are scripted, but computer controlled opponents will never trick you into believing they’re human. Perhaps not an altogether bad thing, given that you’ll be mowing them down by the truckload.

On the content side, language is the game’s worst offense. The f-bomb drops almost as fast as your ammo counter, along with a slew of other unfortunate words. The argument can be made that men in combat situations would probably be really using those words; while that’s probably true, Bad Company 2 isn’t trying to be a combat simulator any more than Tom Clancy’s HAWX is trying to be a flight simulator (i.e. meh, kinda … yeah, not really).

Violence is the no-brainer issue. While the game never slips into gore-land, M-rated violence is still central to the experience. Bodies are filled with lead, murderfied corpses litter battlefields, and at least one execution occurs up close during a cut scene. The game doesn’t exactly revel in the violence, but it doesn’t treat it with a lot of respect, either.

There isn’t any sexual or spiritual content to speak of, other than the repeated abuse of God and Jesus’ name in dialogue.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is an extremely entertaining experience. It falls quite solidly in the M-rated category, and shouldn’t be approached as just popcorn entertainment – but with discernment and maturity, it’s an enjoyable ride that catches you in the chest and doesn’t let up the pressure until you pry yourself away from the keyboard in a desperate attempt to get some sleep before the sun comes up.

Jerod Jarvis is an independent gaming journalist and founder of Duality Games. He maintains gaming columns for The Washington Times Communities and for The Outpost. When not blogging madly about games, he freelances for the Spokesman-Review in his hometown of Spokane, Washington and attends school at Whitworth University. Check out his presence on Facebook and Twitter to stay up on Duality Games updates and the inside scoop on the gaming news you care about.