I'm not saying Battlefield: Bad Company is bad. It's not. It's a perfectly passable Battlefield game with about as good an online mode as you can expect. But I hereby present the ten reasons you should be playing Frontlines: Fuel of War. You can make what you will of the timing of this list.

Read the reasons after the jump.

10) Ammo clips
You don't carry ammo is a pool from which you fill up each clip as you go. Instead, you carry and use discrete clips that will waste rounds if you reload before they're empty. It's just a little something extra to think about when you press the reload button. Call it tactics or realism.

9) Drones
There's something uniquely satisfying about killing someone remotely. It's like using a mine but being able to watch as it goes off. The variety of sneaky and deadly drones in Frontlines is a great addition. Except when one is shooting at you and you can't find the little jerk driving it.

8) Single player
The opening of mission 4, "Graveyard", is almost enough to single-handedly make single player worthwhile. But these missions against the typically dumb and respawning AI, fought alongside your own typically dumb and respawning friendly AI, are exciting enough to keep you playing when you don't fee like going online. And replaying, if you're interested in the Xbox 360 achievements you get for not dying and for finishing within a certain time limit.

7) Squad chat
You don't have to listen to everyone's chatter. Instead, chat only works within a squad. And as an incentive to join a squad, you can always respawn on your squad leader. If you're not playing with a squad, you're not playing Frontlines.

6) Focused objectives
64-players servers are all well-and-good, but they don't feel any different from, say, 16-player servers when everyone is scrambling willy-nilly around the map. Like Quake Wars, Frontlines focuses everyone on one or two objectives at a time, across a shifting front. It's worth noting that the Battlefield series finally did this in Bad Company.

5) Vehicles aren't the end-all, be-all
With EMP options readily available to everyone who doesn't want to lug around a rocket launcher, Frontlines limits the power of vehicles. It's oh-so-gratifying to tag a rampaging helicopter with an EMP rocket and watch it plummet harmlessly to the ground.

4) The developers are former mod-makers
Kaos Studios has had a tough time of it. These are the guys who did the Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942. Battlefield developers DICE were so impressed, they hired them and put them to work making Battlefield 2. A month later, DICE was acquired by Electronic Arts, who laid the team off once they were finished making the game. Fortunately, THQ hired them to form Kaos Studios. The result is Frontlines: Fuel of War.

3) No medics
This isn't the game for you Florence Nightingales out there. There's no health in the conventional sense. Frontlines uses the now-familiar Call of Duty 4 health care system: if you're non-fatally shot, simply wait a moment for the wound to pass. The result is a much smoother game with no fussing about how many hit points you have left.

2) No assault, support, or snipers either
In fact, there are no classes in Frontlines. Instead, you make your own class by choosing a weapon and a role. The role determines your bonus equipment and the advanced abilities you'll earn as you gain experience points over the course of the match. It's flexible and powerful, and it means you don't have to always be scissors to someone else's paper.

1) Free downloadable content
We've known for a while that Kaos has been working on downloadable content in the form of five new maps, some with extra weapons and vehicles. But what we haven't known is how much they're going to charge for the new maps. Now we know: the new Boneyards map – which is great – is free! Here's to hoping this is the trend for Frontlines' future downloadable content.