Having played every Battlefield release since Battlefield 1942 I am accustomed to the almost predictable bevy of errors, crashes, laggyness, and bugs found on launch week. Bad Company 2 however has set the precedent for quite possibly the worse launch of a BF game to date. The auth server is down about 1/3 of the time, and even if you get into a game you’re likely to only play for seconds before a Punkbuster Init failure, and if not that then a “Connection to game server has been lost” error.

Besides the fact that the game is quite literally unplayable, it’s still the best MP FPS ever made. The graphics on a couple of maps are really insane. The jungle foliage is super-realistic on Laguna Presa and I can almost taste the sand in my mouth on maps like Atacama Desert and Africa Harbor.

Overall the game gets an A++, but EA gets a big fat F- for all of the server issues this game is having. You would think that by the 7th BF release EA, the largest computer gaming company in the world, would have a tried and true recipe for launch day, but such is obviously not the case.

Launch day screens: