More About Bad Company 2

I've now gotten to the point in Bad Company 2 that there is nothing left to unlock. I have all the guns and all the gadgets and I even went well out of my way to secure the Garand via DICE's veteran program. Basically, I've played the crap out of the game at this point (over 2 days worth), and I'm ready to start breaking it down into further detail.

First and foremost, this is one of the best shooters I've played in some time. The Rush gametype is simply fantastic. One thing I've missed about the first Gears of War is playing games that would take up to 45 minutes to complete, based on how competitive the teams were. Rush is like that. The game is built so that if the teams are evenly matched, I'd say the offense has about a 60% chance of winning at each pair of bombsites, and then somehow each team really does have about a 50% chance of winning each game. The best games are where the offense gets down to 15 or so attempts every time and somehow keeps pulling through it all the way to the final showdown at the end.

I think I can pretty definitively say that the M60 is hands-down the best LMG. If you put a red dot and magnum ammo on that puppy, you can snipe people by firing one shot at a time. The other gun that stands out as better-than-the-rest is the AN-94 Abakan, an assault rifle that fires in two-round bursts. The fully automatic VSS sniper is also pretty nasty when you put a red dot scope on it and use it close or medium range, but, ironically, it doesn't have the same range as the AN-94 or the M60.

While there are only 5 Rush maps at this point, I have to say that all of them--with the exception of Nelson Bay--are expertly crafted. I find myself celebrating each time a new game starts as if we had just gotten a good map in a sea of bad ones (something I've just gotten used to). While Nelson Bay isn't terrible, it's dark, there are no vehicles, and it's the only map I've actually gotten spawn-camped on (that was a singular occurance, however). I don't mean to say that Nelson Bay is a bad map, I just don't like it as much.

The Hind is nearly impossible to take out on Isla Inocentes. There needs to at least be a Bakcha AA or a stationary AT at the attacker spawn so they have a chance at destroying it.

The squad system can get a little frustrating at times because if you have a party of more than four, it's a real pain in the tookus to get everyone in the same game and on the same team. It'd be nice if you could go to the create a squad menu and create two squads that join a game together. They might not get on the same team to begin with because of how the dedictaed servers work, but hopefully they would eventually. Actually, come to think of it, if you have dedicated servers, why can't I just pick a game to go into? That way I could make sure my party gets into a game with fewer people so my dog tags aren't on the line.

Anyway, the game is fantastic. I absolutely cannot throw enough praise at it. I don't see myself going back to a Call of Duty of any sort for a while. DICE really has their shit together, and they may just be defining online warfare.

--Chilly P

p.s. The single-player was a huge let down. I really enjoyed the first game's campaign, but I wouldn't recommend anything past the first 6 levels (Once you do the part where you run between buildings to keep warm, you can safely call it quits).