As we already wrote, we are now publishing the full review, after extensively testing BC2. This is reasonable in that, for a proper testing of a (mainly) multiplayer game, the said game should be tested for a longer period under different conditions.

 

Bad Company 2, the successor to the console-exclusive BC1, is the first DICE Product for PC based on their Frostbite engine.

 

We shall not spend much time with Single Player, since we do not like spoilers, but in general let it be said it is fun, has some jokes in it, and overall well made. There are no awe and shock moments really, but that can be understandable, as the single player part is actually more like an add-on to the real core of the game, which is the multiplayer experience.

 

 

Yep, the language in the multiplayer is excesive, but strangely enough only the character voices - the chat gets filtered - leading to sometimes very funny results.

 

The title says much about the multiplayer: It is bad ass, almost everything is destructible thanks to DICEs Destruction 2.0 Technology and this is a first in FPS multiplayer games - it literally changes the way you approach gaming.

 

So, enemies are coming, and I'm alone here? Oh, no problem, I will just hide in this house, behind the wall ...

 

The wall that is not much longer there - campers are nowhere safe, since basically every cover can be blown up - with nades, mortars, RPGs, tanks, you name it.

 

 

There are several game modes in BC2, Rush being the new mode. In this mode, the maps are always divided into sectors, and blowing up 2 MCOMs in a sector makes the next sector available. The Defenders of course have to try to defend the MCOMs from being blown up by the attackers.

 

Other game modes are Squad Rush, Conquest and a few combinations of the above.

 

There are a fairly large number of weapons that can be unlocked, and many pins, insignias and achievement. We must say that at the beginning, these unlocks just keep pouring in, but above level 30, there is not much left to unlock. For some this can lead to the loss of wish to continue to play the game. We think DICE should do something about this.

 

 

Unfortunately, although being a sequel to BC1 and not BF2, this is still a DICE game, and it was expected it would be buggy at the beginning. Seems like DICE is trying to patch the things up, but based on peoples reactions on official Forums, there are still a lot of things to be done. Although not detrimental for the game itself, these bugs can often be frustrating - e.g. the bad hit detection (you fire 20 bullets on someone, and only 2 get registered), or the broken knife (last patch broke it, so knifing someone is pure luck now).

 

One can see that the game can be an exceptional mutliplayer experience, and our score is based on that - this is also why we waited for a few patches before publishing the review. There is also a new patch due, where DICE promised they will fix the knife, Text chat and a few other things.

 

 

As for bad hit registration, OUR suggestion was of course to have DICE allow custom dedicated servers (at present you can only rent a server at an authorized GSP, you cannot build your own root server). Seems that part in this problem has also to do with the old EA Plasma master servers, that are unable to handle the load. Seems though that EA is determined to not allow this.

 

If the major bugs are fixed in the next patch, and gradually the hit registration improves, the game can look forward to a longer lifetime, and possible add ons and DLC.