Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (PC via Steam)

Summary:

Unfortunately this is not my favorite Battlefield, in fact it's my least favorite. Battlefield 2 BLOWS this version away... Overall, the game feels incomplete and could use about another year of development time.

Single Player
The Singleplayer campaign is a Design mess with all ideas straight ripped from the COD franchise. It's quite embarrassing to play a game that has the same exact scenarios or moments as another you played previously. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's no such thing as a original idea, but when you take a concept from another game, at least put your own twist or "flava" on it. So to top it off with horrible design and copy-cat content the game has an enormous amount of bugs, which almost prevented me from completing the Singleplayer campaign. Everything from "completing the objective only to restart from previous checkpoint" to "awesome random crashes" happens to frequent and is just another EA top-notch disappointment.

Multiplayer
First I must mention, this game's claim to fame is the hybrid of dedicated servers, match making and friends list all rolled into the same UI. But... As classic EA would have it, all of the features either broken or are not how you should design and execute a feature. The UI is the slowest UI system I've seen in a game... Even slower than the NHL 10 for the Xbox 360. The UI connects to EA's awesome servers and updates everything... Only you get to see the spinning busy icon for at least 20-30 seconds before even able to search for a browser. Now... I have yet to use the match-making feature since everyone who has talked to me about said it's broken. So, I went to the heart, where all hardcore gamers are going to search for their server, the server browser... After clicking "Server Browser" I get the spinning busy icon again, but this time it can last for much longer than 5 minutes!!! 5 minutes? you ask... Yes!!! In fact, I hit "Cancel" so it doesn't fetch the entire server list, and just gives me what he has fetched. Granted the Server Browser takes an additional 10 seconds to display the list after you hit cancel. Sweet, so now I have my list... I have a friend on the east coast playing on a specific server, which he tells me the partial name so I can easily look for it in the sorted list. But then I see to the right of the server list a "Filter Search." I thought, sweet, I can use this to help narrow down my server list. But to my great surprise (I don't think I was that surprised) the "name search" is not a substring search, it's a full-string search!? WTF!? Are you kidding me!? How the hell is that going to help ANYONE!? It's probably case sensitive too! So after failing to search (don't forget, it takes minutes to refresh OR search through the servers) I decided to sort and painstakingly go through each server looking for the exact server name. My friend also said he couldn't find the server name in-game anywhere so I was hunting. Without finding it for 5 minutes I decided to use the Friends system they have built-in... "Oh yea, that will be the shit! Should've done this sooner." So I added him to my Friends List, he added me... But neither of us got a confirmation or message about it... Oh yea... That's right kiddies, the Friends List feature doesn't even fucking work!!! OMGBBQSAUCE!

So, to recap the insanely long story above, the best feature that could out-show COD does not work... AT ALL!

Overally, the Multiplayer is slightly better than the Singleplayer which encourages teamwork if you have a team that knows how to play. Most of the time it's a lopsided battle where one team just gets rolled... However, I have had a couple rounds where it's really close and feels like you will win and sometimes do. Unfortunately the Multiplayer experience is plagued with an extremely slow Menu system to find servers and lots and lots and LOTS of bugs. Including unable to join a server you were just on, or if you refresh the server list too much it crashes. And to top off the frustrations, it takes forever to gain XP if you don't know how to. Great for end-users... <-That's sarcasm.

Likes:

Overall:

Sounds
This is the best feature in the game by far... The sound processing and immersion of the sound ambiance is spot on, or at least different and has their own direction which fits the game.

Single Player:

Overall Experience
Waste of time.

Multiplayer:

Mortars
So far the most fun (which is not very high) is calling in the Mortars as a Recon person... Helps defense when you're limited to slow bolt action Rifles.

Dislikes:

Ripped off Moments

Mile-high club from COD4 But it's extremely jarring (round a L turn-gun goes away-shoot guy with hostage-in slowmo)... I also ran into a bug on this, I shot the dude holding the hostage ran next to him cause the guy was super slow and it restarted me from my last checkpoint... C'mon EA! BUGZ!

...There are at least a handful more that I don't care to remember right now...

Keymapping
After 6 or whatever amount of years it's been since Battlefield 1942 came out they still have yet to develop a UI that intuitively manages the binds... They still go with a the same clunky "must bind everything independently," meaning, you have to bind all of the keys each time, for infantry/vehicle/aircraft, if you don't use the standard WASD controls. By now you'd think they have it so it auto-binds the commands that are the same for each style. But no... That's too intuitive.

Crashed a few times
A few times in the MP UI and a couple times while playing SP.

WTF:

WTF OMG BLOOM!
Only the PC some producer douche-bag (more than likely) thought it'd be awesome if they pump up the bloom without a Bloom setting in the options! And when you're looking through a sniper scope it increases the bloom even MORE! Luckily I know how to edit .ini files. I found the settings.ini (forgot the actual filename cause I uninstalled this game already), but near the root of the BFBC2 install directory there's an .ini file that you can edit. Open that up and look for bloom and change the value to false or 0. Made my MP experience a lot better... Game still sucks though.

Menus
Why the fuck are they so slow!?!?!?! Argh! EA had more than 70 people working on the PC version alone (so they claim) and the menus are balls!