Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (BC2) is the latest in the Battlefield series of games from DICE. I can't say I'm an authority on the series, but I've played many of them, including the original Battlefield: 1942 (BF1942), Battlefield: Vietnam (BFV), and Battlefield 2 (BF2). I skipped the other games for various reasons, but I was excited enough about BC2 to pre-order it. Read on to find out whether it rises above its predecessors.
I didn't think in-game visuals could get much better than BF2 when it was released. It looked so real sometimes that it actually creeped me out. On the one hand BC2 isn't a huge leap forward, unlike BF2 was over its predecessors, but it does break new ground for the series nevertheless.
The models are great, the textures are almost uniformly wonderful, and the animations are very fluid, but I think it's probably the special effects and post-processing that impress me most. Explosions look powerful, tracers cut the air like lasers, the sun flares beautifully, and the particle effects are head and shoulders above anything else I've seen of late.
The dust thrown up by firefights has to be seen to be believed. When the game first released it was almost ridiculous: any amount of shooting would make it impossible to see. But the first major patch toned it down a bit and largely solved that issue. Now it's a reasonable impediment to sustained fire and looks outstanding.
What shocks me is that all this visual goodness doesn't come at an absurd price. When BF2 shipped it caused gamers around the world to update their rigs. I fought my own rig for months before moving to a larger power supply and a better video card; BF2 drove my hardware to the point of thermal failure until I surrendered and upgraded.
In contrast, BF2 runs surprisingly well on my two-year old gaming rig, and that's with all the basic sliders maxed! I can even enable 2x anti-aliasing (AA) at 1920 x 1200, though that slows the frame rate a bit more than I like. If I forgo the AA I can get a pretty consistent 60 FPS (capped at my monitor's refresh rate), so that's usually how I run the game.
The only complaint I can make about the visuals is that I found one bad texture in the single player game. In one particular spot I found a grassy hill that looked awful. That's it. Otherwise, everything is beautiful and runs smoothly.
The audio is on par with the visuals. The various guns have pretty distinct reports. I've learned to distinguish a medic's M60 from the T88 by the sound of the gunfire alone. It doesn't help me stay alive any longer, but it's pretty cool to know what I'm up against by listening.
The music is decent, though there's precious little of it. I thought the music in the original BF1942 was good and BFV improved on the formula, but BF2 took a big step backward compared to its predecessor (BFV had licensed songs you could play over the in-game radio, which was really neat). In contrast, BC2 doesn't make much use of music but what it supplies is decent. For my part I prefer the older themes, but that's a matter of taste.
Best of all, though, I haven't encountered even one audio glitch with BC2. Every single Battlefield game I've previously played has shipped with terribly broken audio, so this is a major step forward for DICE. It seems like the BC2 audio engine wasn't coded by monkeys, though I can't say that about the UI or the game balance as we'll soon see.
I can't find anything to complain about with the audio, and that's from a guy who's pretty fussy.
The interface is a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. First, the good: everything is laid out pretty cleanly and is simple to use. I'd personally prefer a way to view unlock progress offline as one can at the end of a round (i.e., with a progress bar indicating the next unlock for each class and vehicles), but it's not such a big deal now that I've unlocked everything.
The bad is two-fold. First, there is the unpleasant, two-step login process. I realize DICE is giving me the ability to select from multiple EA accounts and have multiple soldier personalities under each account, all of which is nice. But who thought it was a good idea for the user to select those things and click through two separate login steps every time the game is launched!? BF2 had an auto-login feature and BC2 needs one badly.
And second, in the I-can't-believe-it category, we have the game's idiotic omission of class display where it matters most. When you're joining/managing squads and/or looking at the scoreboard you can't see what classes your teammates are playing, so you have no idea what's needed until you're in-game. That's just bloody stupid.
Far worse, the ugly is the downright awful server browser and history system. I'm happy to say that the series of patches at the end of April finally made it usable, but the game was horribly broken at launch in this regard, and DICE stupidly left users twisting in the wind for almost two months before issuing fixes. The laundry list of issues at launch was inexcusable:
And that's just the top ten; I personally counted over thirty major issues with the UI at launch! What I find so impossible to believe is that the developer/publisher could ship the game in such a state. It's not like DICE is a brand new studio shipping their first big title. They've shipped nearly a dozen Battlefield games/expansions by now, so there is simply no valid excuse for such glaringly obvious stupidity.
Two months after release the majority of the issues are resolved; the game still doesn't remember my preferred game mode ("Rush"), but I can live with that. So the verdict for the interface is horribly, stupidly, inexcusably broken at launch but finally usable two months after the fact. Not what I'd call impressive.
BC2 is an interesting step forward in terms of its game mechanics. It supplies the user with four archetypal classes from which to choose: (1) assault, (2) engineer, (3) medic, and (4) recon. From my past history with the series I assumed those classes corresponded to four roles: (1) anti-infantry, (2) anti-vehicle and vehicle support, (3) anti-infantry and infantry support, and (4) long-range anti-infantry and/or close-range anti-vehicle. Boy was I wrong for reasons we'll soon explore.
The very best improvement these classes bring is in the ways they mesh. DICE has done a good job of giving players incentive (through experience, pins, and so forth) to do things that benefit their team, which is something precious few FPS games accomplish. The engineer is rewarded for repairing vehicles, the medic is rewarded for providing health, the assault is rewarded for dropping ammo, and the recon is rewarded for his motion sensor use. Each class is rewarded for killing and achieving objectives too, but those fundamental team play functions naturally push players toward cohesion, which is a departure from previous games in the series.
Speaking of departures, the most obvious change in game mechanics is the change in weapons. Previous games featured generally accurate firearms that did significant damage, but BC2's arsenal is quite inaccurate and frequently underpowered by comparison. It used to be possible to run and gun successfully in prior games, even "dolphin diving" did little to mess with one's accuracy, which is significant when a bullet or two is generally enough to score a kill. This is not the case with BC2.
I confess I can't say I've mastered the basic shooting mechanics despite my nearly seventy hours with the title thus far, but I have learned a few things. First, the game does feature bullet drop. In practical use this matters only for sniper rifles and long-range AT fire. At long range I have to snipe an inch or two above a target's avatar to pull off a headshot, while I have to aim high by as much as a couple of feet for long range shots with the AT rifles.
Second, it's really the accuracy that's harder to understand. If I stop moving, wait for the reticule to collapse, and then pause for just a moment before pulling the trigger, I find I can pull off carefully-aimed headshots pretty reliably with some of the assault rifles (most notably the AN-94 and M16A2). But it really takes some concentration to pull it off at range. In contrast, I find the medic weapons (light machine guns) and engineer weapons (submachine guns) to be far more accurate at close range and far easier to use at moderate to long range. Aiming is trickier in BC2 than in prior Battlefield games and doesn't always seem consistent.
Third, there's the damage, which is almost uniformly underwhelming or overwhelming; there's almost no happy middle in BC2. The assault class, which I assumed would be the game's anti-infantry "heavy hitter", is arguably the second-weakest class in the game when it comes to a straight up firefight. I find all assault rifles to be weaker than any of the medic weapons, any of the engineer weapons—especially the ridiculously over-powered M2 Carl Gustav AT—and weaker than most of the pistols, shotguns, and especially the knife. It's a sad, sad day in gaming when I would much rather be holding a knife than an M16A2 for CQB (close-quarter battle).
Surprisingly, medics are easily the most powerful and simplest class to play in the game for two reasons. First, they can chuck powerful healing kits frequently and/or revive their teammates for support. Having an improved health kit at your feet won't keep you alive under constant fire, but it will give you a non-trivial edge. And second, their guns are head and shoulders above the others. BF2's light machinegun wielding support gunner was great up close but weak at range; BC2's medics have no such weakness.
The medic's M60 is easily the best gun in the game. It has a large clip (100 rounds), spits out ammunition at a terrifying rate, does great damage, and is accurate to begin with; combined with the "Magnum Ammunition" or "Marksman LMG Training" specializations (for greater damage/accuracy respectively), it's a laser-beam-of-death! Point, fire, and mow down enemies by the handful from any range. Even more amazing, it kills reliably through walls! So it's not like you have to see your target; I've killed guys in houses simply by randomly hosing the walls! A few well-placed medics with nearby ammo can make it nearly impossible for a team to surmount a choke point. I've seen it happen too many times.
The second deadliest class is surely the engineer. Their submachine guns are accurate, even at range, and do great damage when you take their rate of fire into account. That they're silenced makes them all the more useful for attacks from behind; enemies frequently won't notice their buddies getting killed until it's too late. But guns aren't why the engineer is so easy to play: the AT weapons, AT being (ironically in this case) short for "anti-tank", are preposterously powerful against infantry. BF2 did a good job of balancing because you could use the AT rockets to kill infantry, but it wasn't easy to hit and took more than one shot. In contrast, BC2's Gustav is a zero-effort engine of explosive death.
Imagine a sniper rifle that's highly accurate out to very long range. Then imagine that you don't even need to hit your target to hurt him. Then imagine that the bullets are explosive and kill everybody within, say, a five foot radius. Then imagine that you can choose between tagging enemies with a special marker that attracts the bullets or guiding the bullet's trajectory in flight. Congratulations! You've just described the "AT" weapons in BC2!
Why they're even called "AT" is utterly beyond me, given that they're far more effective against infantry than vehicles. A pair of engineers repairing a heavy tank can make it all but impossible to destroy, even under concentrated RPG fire from multiple sources. But equipping a Gustav rifle makes you the second most feared infantry killer in the game, second only to M60-equipped medics. Seriously, you barely have to aim. You point somewhere near the target and fire and watch the multi-kills happen. And you don't really have to worry if they're behind cover either: unless your target is behind quite a bit of solid rock, you're going to kill him anyway. The freaking Gustav shoots through schools!
Frankly, the engineer's main weakness is the rate at which he chews through ammunition. There are some specializations to help with that, but nothing replaces a friendly assault trooper's ammo drops. An ammo-supplied engineer with a Gustav can pretty much dominate a choke point between his grenades and uber-rockets. Snipers can be pretty effective in taking down Gustav whores, but they'd better hit with the first shot: rockets have almost as much range, do much more damage, and are much easier to aim. It's crazy how simple it is to pop out of cover, blast a wall and kill everybody on the other side, and then duck back to reload.
All of which leaves the assault class in a strange place. The only guaranteed one-shot kill options he has available are through careful headshots (and then only with some assault rifles) or the underslung 40 mm grenade launcher, unaffectionately referred to as the "n00b tube". The result is that I lose most straight-up gun battles when playing assault unless I get the drop on somebody. Medics can easily aim for center of mass and mow me down before I can get enough bullets into them for the kill, while engineers can headshot me far more easily or simply blow me up with rockets. The only class I can reliably take down in a gun fight is recon, but even then a well-placed sniper round is instant death.
Most bizarre, though, is the knife. Prior to the latest patch, it was completely common to see players run through hails of bullets to score instant, one-hit kills with the combat knife from up to five or maybe even six feet away. The patch seems to have toned down this behavior, and a friend put me onto a possible fix for the crazy hit detection (which I'm happy to say seems to work for me), so the game is much more playable than it was at launch. I can honestly say that not one player has run through gunfire to knife me since trying the fix, and that's a radical change.
Despite his weakness, the assault class remains absolutely necessary for his ability to drop ammo packs. Assault fighters regenerate 40 mm grenades and regular grenades surprisingly quickly, which makes it possible to saturate an area completely with explosions with as few as two assault troopers. This is used on public servers to great effect on some maps, so it's clear the assault fighter has his role; it's just not at all what I expected given the name of the class.
Speaking of off-base expectations, I thought the recon class was intended to be a sniper, deadly and far removed from battle, but I completely missed the mark. Quite the contrary, BC2's recon class is best when right in the middle of the action. Yes, when equipped with a sniper rifle he can hang back and plink away from long range, arguably more effectively than most other classes, but that strategy loses plenty of games. The best use of recon is when it's limited to one or two players (out of sixteen) and is up close and personal.
The recon's greatest asset is his motion sensor, because it reveals all enemies within its radius. And because the recon gets non-trivial points (thirty compared to the twenty normally awarded for simple spotting), they make for great leveling. I've gained hundreds of points simply by throwing a motion sensor near MCOMs under assault, because it reveals nearby enemies and gives me copious score as they're killed. Couple the motion sensor with a powerful shotgun, and the ability to call down artillery or place C4 charges, and the recon class is both deadly and versatile.
The last major item I'll mention is the destructibility. This time around most cover isn't durable. In previous Battlefield titles most static objects were indestructible; even small wooden crates could indefinitely withstand fire from a tank's main gun. BC2 throws this out the window. There are a number of durable objects in the game, but almost all of the buildings, houses, etc. can be damaged and even destroyed as battle progresses, which is simultaneously a refreshing change and a royal pain all at the same time.
It's refreshing because it greatly changes the nature of play. This isn't a game where an enemy can entrench behind cover with complete safety. The amount of complete safety to be found in BC2 lies somewhere between slim and none. Enemies hiding behind walls can be perforated by light machinegun fire, blown to bits by AT rockets, or die from a collapsing ceiling when some plucky recon manages to plant C4 in all the right places.
On the other hand it's a pain precisely because there is so little safety. Almost without exclusion, every other first-person shooter (FPS) game I've played gives me cover. I may have to worry about incoming fire from every other direction; I may even have to worry about grenades; but I've never previously had to worry about fire coming through my cover. BC2 sometimes makes me feel like I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't. If I pop my head up out of cover it will get blown off, but if I stay in cover I'll get M60'ed, Gustav'ed, n00b-tubed, grenaded, etc.
The key point is that your safety in BC2 doesn't depend on the environment nearly as much it does the awareness of other players. This makes flanking maneuvers and attacks from the rear more powerful than ever and totally changes the game with respect to weapons that transmit damage through walls. On the whole I find the destructibility both refreshing and interesting, but I've cursed it as well on more than one occasion.
There's quite a bit more that could be said because BC2 departs from its predecessors in many other respects. Players regenerate health. Spawn points aren't raped nearly so easily as they were in the previous games (praise the Lord!). There is no prone position, so dolphin diving isn't even possible, and there is a death camera, so so a lone, well-hidden, talented sniper cannot dominate the game (though the death camera is turned off on many servers). Vehicles aren't paper thin and don't take damage from running into walls, rocks, etc.
Suffice it to say that the game mechanics are its greatest strength and arguably its greatest source of frustration. The game is night-and-day different today compared to when it launched. Personally, I'd like to see the medic weapons and the AT rifles nerfed, and I think the assault rifles need boosting. I also think some sniper rifles should be non-trivially more deadly (and more sharply distinguished from the others) than they are: one shot to the head or two shots to the chest should always kill. But one could probably mount a decent opposing argument for some of those complaints.
BF1942 didn't have a story, BFV did no better, and BF2 quasi tried (and failed). BC2 finally takes a solid bite at the apple. The game's single player campaign tells a largely forgettable tale through the viewpoints of a rookie addition to the Bad Company, a horribly cliched misfit unit. Each character is so narrowly defined and retreads such familiar ground (e.g., the gruff but fair black sergeant who's nearing retirement) that there's no discernable literary value.
Still, the different "relationships" do provide the context for some funny one-liners and some quasi-interesting banter. It's certainly better than listening to yet another story about Ellis' buddy Keith in between zombie hordes (take a look at Left 4 Dead 2 if you find that intriguing), but you're not going to care about any of these guys or anything that happened by the time it's over.
But as I've said so many times: good games don't necessarily need much of a story. It's a fantastic thing when it happens, but the single player campaign is full of relatively interesting shooting without it. If you need gripping dialogue to enjoy a game, then BC2 isn't going to float your boat. If you're like most FPS players you'll have no complaints.
May I start by applauding DICE for producing another game not set during World War II? BF2 was such a welcome change of pace, and I almost bought Battlefield 2142 (BF2142) solely on the strength of its futuristic setting (but ultimately didn't because I was skeptical of the "Titan" mode from the demo). I'm so bloody tired of WWII that BC2's modern setting alone made it of great interest to me.
The content of BC2 is fairly impressive. The game ships with no less than ten maps whose territory includes desert, snow, and jungle. The environments are obviously pretty varied, and the maps seem lovingly crafted, practically bursting with places to hide and nice little details. Clearly a great deal of thought was given to moving through the world toward the objectives.
The main complaint, though, is that the maps are insufficiently distinct. I remember once I get in-game, but I can't ever keep the details straight otherwise. With BF2, for example, players either loved or hated Karkand but all would admit it was instantly recognizable and highly memorable. With BC2 I'm sure I'll remember bits and pieces, but I can't imagine being able to describe a map in any detail years hence—as I can still do today even with some of the BF1942 maps.
There just aren't any big, interesting landmarks that stick out. Everything is pretty much water, dirt, a bunch of stuff you can destroy, and then the rocks and metal shipping containers that forever remain on the landscape. On rare occasion there's a big oil pipeline, but that's about it for major landmarks.
The selection of classes, while less than half of those in some other games (I'm looking at you, Team Fortress 2), is welcome in its simplicity and allows players to adapt them to personal styles of play through different loadouts. Speaking of which, the arsenal of weapons, gadgets, and specializations is quite varied. BF2 gave the player a degree of choice but BC2 greatly increases the options, which makes for a much more interesting game. As previously indicated, my own preconceptions of the class roles were badly off base, and while it isn't possible for every class to fulfill every role there's enough overlap to provide a lot of latitude.
For example, the recon class can do the long-range sniper thing with the M24, SV98, SVU, GOL, or M95 rifles and do it well for gamers with exceptional aim and patience. Or he can retain decent long-range sniping but sacrifice some damage for firing speed via the Type 88 rifle, which fires quickly enough to be useful even up close. I've killed more than one bad guy in CQB with it, though it's definitely not my go-to CQB weapon. Or the recon can abandon the sniping thing altogether and go with shotguns instead which, coupled with the "12 Gauge Slugs" specialization, remain pretty accurate even at long range.
Though certain choices have clearly emerged as dominant (e.g., a medic's M60 with the "Magnum Ammunition" specialization), the loadout customization allows a lot of flexibility and should provide players with quite a bit of room for experimentation over the game's life. Thus far I've achieved silver stars with a majority of the weapons (click here for my underwhelming stats), but I still feel like there's plenty of room for growth. And more important I'm still finding interesting things to try; not all of them work, mind you, but some of the combinations can be refreshing.
As is practically becoming de rigueur, all of the best weapons and gadgets in the game must be unlocked by accumulating experience, which accrues both online and in the single-player campaign for a very welcome change. The up side to this is that it provides continued incentive to play. The potential down side is that everything will likely be unlocked by the time the player reaches roughly half the level cap, which is set at fifty.
For my own part, my soldier had unlocked everything for all the classes by level twenty-four, and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I think it's great that I was able to unlock everything relatively "quickly" compared to hitting the level cap (I've read that level fifty takes nearly three-hundred hours compared to the roughly seventy I've invested), but now that it's all unlocked I don't feel nearly as much incentive to keep playing. The achievements and pins and awards are nice, I suppose, but the desire to play with the next toy was a big part of my motivation. Now that I've collected all the toys I wonder: how much longer will I play?
Happily, BC2 also brings a new game mode to the Battlefield series. The old-school "Conquest" mode is still there, but I've personally grown tired of it and generally prefer the new "Rush" mode. It reminds me of the assault mode from the original Unreal Tournament in that the attacking team has to proceed through several stages to achieve victory. The objectives are always the same (destroy two MCOM stations through any means), but the staging means that each individual map demands more than one approach to surmount different terrain and obstacles.
BC2 also supplies a "Squad Rush" mode, which pits two four-man squads against each other for a far smaller and more tactically careful experience, and a "Squad Deathmatch" mode, which provides the same sort of straightforward team deathmatch found in dozens (if not hundreds) of other games. The weapon loadout customization arguably makes BC2 a somewhat more interesting deathmatch, but I still think the ultimate form of that game mode was realized in Raven Shield and isn't likely to be topped.
Still, it's nice to have some options and the new game mode is surprisingly engaging.
The main down side to the content is bugs. In the interest of giving credit where it's due, I doff my virtual cap to DICE: every other Battlefield game I played shipped as a horribly broken mess at best, but BC2 was almost rock-solid for me on launch day. The server browser was clearly the weakest link, for all the reasons mentioned previously, but I fully expected to deal with visual issues, audio issues, control issues, constant crashing, and every other problem for which DICE games are infamous on launch day and those expectations were greatly exceeded. I know many players complained that they couldn't get into multiplayer games at all, but I honestly didn't have any trouble on launch day, so maybe I had a bit of good luck?
Having said that, the first few patches actually made the game worse in terms of stability. The second to last patch upped the crash-to-desktop frequency to the point where I was quitting in frustration from being unable to make the server browser work long enough to get into a game (those who want details should check out the blog entry inspired by one particularly awful night). Thankfully, the latest major patch seems to have addressed most of the crashing issues and has finally made the server browser usable if somewhat underwhelming.
Nevertheless, a number of highly irritating issues remain. Aside from balance issues, hit boxes are probably at the very top of the player list of complaints these days. All too often it's possible to dump an entire clip into a charging enemy and hit nothing but air. I've personally witnessed 40 mm grenades explode against an enemy's chest and do nothing; rockets pass right through soldiers, tanks, jeeps, and pretty much every other vehicle; mistaken client animations—little is more frustrating than seeing an enemy's head snap back and blood spray only to discover the headshot didn't actually do anything—and a host of other glitches.
Arguably worse, soldiers can get stuck in walls, trapped in windows, hung up on doorways, and even locked in place by the tiniest bits of rubble on the ground. Those issues have been greatly reduced with patches, thank goodness, but they still remain. An entirely different class of problems with resetting ranks/stats, weapon unlocks, kit customizations, and the like are similarly frustrating, though I'm grateful to have been spared the various experiences I've read about in forum posts.
There also remain a few really cheesy tactics that I hope get addressed. Just last night I discovered a new super-fast way to destroy MCOMs. The match had just started and most of my team seemed to be gravitating toward defending objective bravo, so I went to make sure that alpha was safe. When I got there I found two enemies already in the building but was surprised to see them exiting without placing a charge. I followed them and gunned them down from behind but not before they chucked a couple of grenades into the building. Imagine my surprise seconds later when the MCOM station was destroyed!
I dashed off a message in the chat channel asking if that was some kind of exploit, blowing up an MCOM station with a measly two grenades, and one of them replied that it wasn't the two grenades that did it: the two grenades merely detonated all the C4 charges and AT mines they had dropped on the MCOM. I haven't tried it, so I don't know how many grenades, C4 charges, AT mines, or whatever are needed, but that's one seriously cheesy tactic that lets a couple of players kill an MCOM within the first minute of a game. I really hope it gets nerfed/patched.
But of course I've been speaking largely of the multi-player experience thus far, and I can't stress enough that BC2 includes a decent single-player campaign! The "single-player" aspect of previous Battlefield games was nothing more than the multi-player aspect with incredibly stupid bots. It was somewhat useful for testing new tactics and learning how to fly, but that's about it; there really wasn't much fun to be had with the bots. The single-player campaign in BC2 is far from perfect, but it's genuinely entertaining and provides some clear value lacking in the previous games.
The final verdict for the content is positive. There are plenty of issues yet to be resolved, and if history is any guide many of them will go unaddressed for years (if ever). I understand the BF2142 community is still waiting for a patch announced back in November, 2008, though DICE claims it's still coming. They have a solid history of providing updates for a long time, but that's part of the problem: they tend to leave gamers twisting in the wind for months or even years before resolving issues, if they're addressed at all. Despite the problems, however, there's still quite a bit of fun to be had with the content of BC2, and the patches seem to have turned the corner and are genuinely improving the game in significant ways.
Most of what has already been said applies to the multi-player aspect of the game, so here I'll address some remaining issues particular to the multi-player experience. First, the network code is pretty darned good. The game has hitbox issues and I've seen some "warping" (i.e., instant shifts of player position as the client updates coordinates from an overloaded connection/server), but on the whole the network code is as good as one might expect from a company that has made its fortune by focusing on multi-player games. The majority of the experience is very smooth.
The main negative facing players online is the lack of balance, and here I don't mean the underpowered/overpowered weapons. Originally there were no balance options beyond players doing the right thing, but an auto-balancer has recently been added. It triggers, provides messages to encourage players to do the right thing, and ultimately does numerically balance the two teams after what seems to me like an overly long delay. The remaining problem is that nothing prevents the two teams from being radically unbalanced in terms of skill levels.
I've joined plenty of games wherein one team is completely raping the other team, which simply cannot muster any substantive defense. Such games just aren't fun, and I've stopped tolerating them. If I join a game and find the teams radically unbalanced, numerically or in terms of skills, I leave. It might not be the greatest sign of sportsmanship, and I'm sad to say the statistics count such a thing as a loss, but I'm just not going to waste my time in frustration. Thankfully, there are enough servers online that I'm usually able to find a decent matchup within half a dozen tries, though that's not always the case.
It's also worth mentioning that the balancer seems to work with the friends list feature in trying to assign players to teams. As as friend and I have observed, however, it tends to split up friends joining a single server disturbingly often and subsequently won't let the players switch. It may be that it works as well as possible, given the limitations of the game's engine or network code or something. But I can't help but notice how badly it lives up to the simplicity of the party and matchmaking systems of the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live gaming service.
The other negative is the lack of dedicated server files. In the previous games it was always possible to experiment offline. I spent quite a few hours just playing around with things on my own server to learn how to fly, drive, and use certain weapons offline, largely out of consideration for my fellow players. It really sucks when some guy who can't fly for beans grabs the chopper and crashes it immediately into the ground. It's such a waste, especially when such a rare asset can be crucial to winning. BC2's lack of any way for players to experiment locally is pretty painful.
All that said, BC2 is still arguably the finest multi-player game DICE has shipped. It's certainly the most stable by a long shot, so that's got to be progress.
My bottom line with the game has changed significantly since launch. Had you tried to pin me down with a buy/no-buy recommendation as little as two weeks ago, I would have said avoid it. As I've shared with friends, it seemed to me like BC2 contained a great game wrapped up in feces-smeared punji sticks. I could have fun with it, but there were so many frustrations/irritations that I kept finding myself quitting in disgust, almost on the verge of wiping the game from my hard drive on more than one occasion.
Two months after release, the game has been patched sufficiently to be entertaining more often than not. As I hope I've made clear, balance issues and bugs remain, but the game is unquestionably much better than it was. So, if you enjoy multi-player FPS games and are looking for an alternative to the wildly over-the-top Modern Warfare 2, you will likely get your money's worth from BC2. I did, and I've found it very painful at times. Just be sure you're prepared for some frustration along the way and you should be able to have some fun with it too.
05/06/2010