So The Battlefield Bad Company 2 PS3 Beta is about to end on Dec 21st, for those that don’t know Battlefield Bad Company 2 is coming to the Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC next year. This game is going to try and launch an assault on the Modern Warfare 2 gargantuan amount of online players. I have been granted access to the beta test of the game, more on that later.

With the end of the beta coming DICE, the developer, has released some information in the form of a few nice statistics that are shown below.

Total number of kills: 45,420,000
Total number of Vehicle Kills: 9,400,000
3.43M Vehicles Destroyed
1.01M Marksman Headshots
Total number of points awarded: 10,100,094,360 (Summed up as a metric shit ton)
Total number of Revives: 2.52M
Total Repair Tool kills: 15.58K
Total Knife Kills: 1.69M (Surprisingly low)
Total C4 Kills: 730.81K
380,000 houses destroyed
12,000 people killed by a defibrillator (yes the item that is meant to bring life)

That’s some impressive stats from only 300,000 people that were involved in the beta. With so many people playing the game, I bet you feel lonely and out of the loop. Well its ok friend, come closer and I can make you feel better by telling you all about this fantastic game.

Battlefield is a massive name to anyone involved in PC gaming over the last 5 years, but it’s fairly new to consoles. The first game Battlefield Bad Company was a console exclusive and in my opinion was a solid if unspectacular game. Earlier this year Battlefield 1943, the semi sequel to Battlefield 1942, popped up on XBLA and the PSN store. It quickly became one of the highest selling games on the services.

So what’s Battlefield Bad Company 2 like I hear you ask? Well the easiest way to describe it is intense. The game at all times during battle feels like a fight to survive. A combination of great graphics, superb audio (something the first game did fantastic as well) and a massive landscape that contains vehicles and destroyable buildings and terrain.

Yes I said terrain, blowing a hole in the ground then attempting to drive a jeep or ATV flat out over it is a fun way to pass the time but can make you look silly when it flips and you eventually die. The destructible buildings are much improved over the first game and even 1943. Snipers watch out!

The vehicles available to try in the beta are the standard Tank, with room for two people. With one controlling the tank movement and the main turret and the other person taking control of a machine gun in a spiffy video feed. This combination can cause a lot of chaos if the opposition isn’t willing to take you on. There is also the Jeep, ATV and best of all the UAV. Yes you can shoot down the UAV but controlling the little helicopter is a massive amount of fun. It probably has something to do with the UAV being able to call in air strikes. Maybe

During the game you and your team are either defending or attacking two points on a map, the attacking team only has 99 lives for each round before they lose. Once the attackers have destroyed the first two points on the map, the defenders get pushed back to another point on the massive maps for the 2^nd round (this is dynamic, the game doesn’t load during this part.) In total there are 5 rounds on the single beta Map, this should give you an idea of how large the map is. The map contains a single theme but the environments contained in these are made to be increasingly harder for the attacking team.

During my beta experience the Attackers won around 80% of the time, this wasn’t due to the lack of team work though. Due to the objective nature of the game people tend to help each other in the hope that they win the round. Wow look at all that above yet I still haven’t told you it is a class and squad based shooter, well it is.

There are 4 different classes; Assault, Recon (sniper), Medic and of course the Engineer. Each class has their own specific weapons, equipment and appearance. As you use the class and the guns you unlock more weapons specific to that class. Along with this there is an overall rank that unlocks further weapons and traits that can be used across all classes. Traits in the game give are essentially perks from Call of Duty, there are perks for the player and another position for vehicle perks.  The unlock system makes it easy to spend hours upon hours trying to unlock the next weapon or ability.

If you are playing this game out of a squad you are playing it wrong considering you can spawn on any of your squad members, this saves a lot of running and waiting for the action. It seems to make me want to take more chances and provides a lot more “OMG” moments during a match.

Lag, ha what lag? I have played a lot of the beta and never had a game that was unplayable, what ever DICE have done, what ever higher power they have bribed it was the right thing to do. Add that to the fact the game feels right. The first game felt like your enemies took too many bullets to die, in this game you can assume when you need to stop firing. It’s not as little bullets as someone in Call of Duty takes, but it is no where near the whole clip as the first game. It creates a nice balance between the two games that just feels right.

Overall I can’t wait for this game, which is the biggest praise I can heap upon the game since I was thinking of renting it and leaving it at that. It’s not perfect yet; sometimes it feels as if you are being dragged under a vehicle when they are close to you, but its close and isn’t that what is beta test is for? To test the game and find problems with the Beta code.