Battlefield Bad Company 2

A review of the most spectacular, albeit rushed FPS since Battlefield 2

Publisher: EA/DICE
Game Name: Battlefield Bad Company 2 (BFBC2)
Game Type: First Person Shooter
Game Platform: PC
Ages: Mature
Genre: Simulated Warfare
Release Date: 03.02.2010
BFBC2 Gamer Tag: Slaughter51

First of all let me say this, I'm a huge fan of the Battlefield series, especially Battlefield 2 with all the trimmings. While I do enjoy the look of the Call of Duty series, even Modern Warfare 2, no game comes close in complexity of game play to Battlefield 2. Unfortunately this isn't a 2010 review of Battlefield 2, post all the release date issues, no... this is a review of Bad Company 2 from the date of release.

I pre-ordered 3 copies of the game for myself and two buddies from the firehouse who are avid players. Worked a 24 hour shift, got some rest, then picked up the game about an hour after the local Game Stop opened. Got home and immediately started the install. About an hour later, after downloading the updates, etc, I was ready to play and the envy of those who would have to wait to get home to do the install and start playing. I was ahead of the rest of my friends.

Logged into the game and found that the interface itself was more intuitive than any of my other MMO's. I went right into multiplayer and had one of those "Is it real or is it the Matrix?" moments. What you see on the game-play videos on the BFBC2 site is exactly what you see when you play the game. You can become completely immersed in this game. I tip my hat to the developers at DICE, the atmosphere of the game is so realistic that you find yourself ducking and weaving in front of your monitor (ok... I found myself ducking and weaving). Amazing, if not at times disorienting, player motion in an environment that pushes your hand/eye coordination to the limit makes the experience come to life. Finally an adult oriented FPS that gives you complete immersion in the experience, so much so that even the foul language is appropriately matched to the gaming experience.

The controls are much more accurate and the physics are true to life, in most cases, for targeting. The relatively fully destructible environment is a cannon-happy gamer's dream come true. Nothing like pointing your Bradley at enemies within a structure and taking them out by leveling the building. No more running inside a building for cover and hiding behind a wooden wall that RPG's and cannon fire cannot penetrate, just aim your rocket at the wall and remove the obstacle (in some cases there are walls that are indestructible, mostly the metal walls).

Knifing in the past has only ever gotten you kill points and shamed your opponents, but now there's a bonus, collect the enemy's dog tags. Control of the UAV is much more granular now, pick your targets while in the air and rain down fire and brimstone on them. Speaking of hell raining down, unless you've got a heat seeking missile on you when you encounter an enemy helicopter, you will be shredded, mark my word. Get familiar with your shoulder mounted rocket launchers, they are your friends against all vehicles, sure you can still C4 them but with the advanced detection systems you earn with some of the heavy artillery vehicles, you won't stand a chance of getting close enough to plant the explosives.

I guess I've covered multiplayer without giving too much away, so now I'll cover single player. Not much needs to be said other than there's a great storyline, superb dialogue, incredible graphics and audio (I know I've mentioned that before) and it's definitely worth playing the Normal and Hard modes to hone your skills before engaging in multiplayer activity.

Ok, so I started off this review with a fairly ominous tone, yet most of this has been a glowing review. With all that said, I came fairly close to returning my copy of the game to EA for an unopened copy so that I could get a refund from the local Game Stop. "Why?" You might ask would I want to do this, especially after the review I've given thus far...

Multiplayer, for which is the reason every customer has bought the game, only works for a limited and very lucky few. By all forum estimates, somewhere in the vicinity of 80% of customers worldwide either have problems accessing the game in multiplayer or have not been able to play multiplayer at all since the 03.02.2010 release date. What makes it worse is that most of the error messages experienced were seen during beta, as well, but were never addressed by EA/DICE.

Other than a ticker message scrolling at the bottom of the BFBC2 client, EA/DICE have yet to issue any word to customers regarding what is being done to resolve the connectivity issues or even to address the concerns that customers have about purchasing, and in some cases pre-ordering an unplayable game.

The most prevalent error experienced by gamers is "Connection to the game server has been lost. Please check your network connection and try again". I wasn't so concerned seeing this error initially, after playing the game for 4 hours on the release date, however, when I still couldn't play the multiplayer portion of the game up to 3 days later, it became frustrating. Watching friends leveling up, having a great time while I, at first, thought that it was somehow a problem with my gaming rig. Well, after hours of searching for some answer to the problem, I found (on the European forums) a game dev with the moral fortitude to step forward and answer some of the questions that none of his peers or executives would even begin to acknowledge. The problem is with the servers, and while it doesn't seem that EA/DICE knows exactly what that problem is, on 03.05.2010 they released R4 server version to the hosting sites. Unfortunately, that didn't work, nor has any of the PunkBuster fixes posted online. A fix is not a fix if the game only seems to work some of the time after the fix, it's a shot in the dark is what it is.

Was able to get on multiplayer during the night of 03.05.2010 for a few hours but haven't been able to since then. The problem seems to have gotten worse instead of better as now there are issues, as well, with logging into EA's Master authentication server as well as PunkBuster kick messages that weren't there before. Gamers who could get in before are reporting that they have intermittent connectivity issues.

A spectacular game, with a spectacular release date failure rate. Hopefully EA/DICE will get their act together and fix the issues with this game. Unfortunately, this shows they did not learn from their mistakes during the deployment of Battlefield 2.

On a high note, I've finished the single player campaign in Normal mode and I plan on starting the Hard mode tonight.

Good luck soldiers, may your blade be swift and your aim be true.

Game Ratings: (1=Poor, 2=Barely Passable, 3=Fair, 4=Good, 5=Excellent)

Audio Experience = 5
Visual Experience = 5
Intutive Controls = 5
Granularity of Controls = 5
Field of View = 5
GamePlay Complexity = 4
Single Player Experience = 5
Multi-player Experience = 1 (When EA fixes their connectivity issues, this will change to a 5, guaranteed)