It’s no secret that a lot of people aren’t able to play the new Battlefield: Bad Company beta for a myriad of reasons. For starters, it’s not a public beta, which immediately limits the pool of players. The beta is exclusive for IGN subscribers, with a few public keys being available as well. If you miss out on the keys, you’re out of luck - no beta for you. The second reason people can’t play is the fact that the servers have been a complete mess on the first day. Upon firing up the beta, I was greeted by an incredibly slow crawling message across the top of the screen stating that the servers were currently being inundated by the demand, and that EA is working on it. Several of my friends haven’t managed to get into a game all day long, but I’ve been sitting pretty with about one-in-three odds of making it into a game when I try. A Battlefield game with technical difficulties?! I’m acting astonished!

Let’s face it folks, if you’re a PC gamer you know that this is par for the course for the BF games. If you’ve ignored BF 1942, BF 2, BF: Vietnam, and BF 2142, then congratulations and welcome to the same horrible support that PC gamers have been complaining about ever since the series debuted 6 years ago. I’ve already seen plenty of people trying to blame this on Xbox Live, but my money’s on this being EA’s fault. Their track record’s just too spotty to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Getting beyond the immediate technical issues, let’s talk a bit about the game itself. To describe it as simply as possible: it’s Battlefield 2-lite with an object destruction gimmick. Alright, that’s not being entirely fair. Let me try again: it’s Call of Duty 4 with a vehicle gimmick. Wait, that’s not much better.

Battlefield: Bad Company’s beta throws you into one of two different maps, both featuring an attack and defend system that requires one team to attack some crates of gold while another tries to stop them. Sounds simple enough right? Like all of the previous entries in the Battlefield series, Bad Company mixes things up by throwing several different player classes into the fray, and of course, vehicles. The first map I played was called Oasis, and this is definitely the map for vehicles. You won’t want to get around on foot on this map, as the distance between your base the objective is just long enough to be annoying to have to run. Better to hop into a tank, dune buggy, or better yet a helicopter to get from point A to point B. Vehicles are bountiful, unlike some of the previous BF games which would often lead to rampant team-killing as players fight over vehicle possession. I only encountered TKing near the helicopters, which are understandably limited in numbers. Another behavioral issue that Bad Company fails to solve is the fact that people love to take off in vehicles when they’re the sole occupant. It would be nice if the developers could come up with some way to positively reinforce vehicle usage, but maybe I’m just asking for too much. No matter how well the game is designed, there will always be poor players.