Since the release of the Bad Company 2 PC beta on Thursday, I have had some quality play time with it, and I’m going to tell you all about it.

Bad Company 2, particularly in its beta stage, isn’t perfect. However, not only is it a heck of a lot of fun, but it has the potential to be one of the best shooters of 2010.

The beta only comes with one game mode, Rush, and one map, Port Valdez. Rush pits two teams of up to 16 players each against each other, one to attack, and one to defend. The defending teams objective is to protect two crates from destruction. The attackers objective, naturally, is to destroy them, either by planting explosive charges or by shooting them.

Although you only get one map to play around with, you do get to experience several of the vehicles in the game. ATV quad bikes are great for flanking your enemies and running down snipers. Light tanks are very useful for attacking large groups of infantry. Then of course, there is the main battle tank. Heavily armoured and armed, this thing rolls slowly across the map, and is ideal for taking on fortified positions while foot soldiers use it as cover. If that wasn’t enough, you can even get in an Apache attack helicopter, a large armed transport chopper or use a remote control UAV to call in Hellfire missiles. All these vehicles make battles’ scenes of barely organized chaos, as tanks open up on each other and missiles rain down around you.

There are no holds barred with the weapons either. Although leveling up in BBC2 is a fairly lengthy process, it is very rewarding. New weapon unlocks, special abilities and ‘specializations’ help to create a very diverse battlefield. And this is what the game thrives on; diversity. There are three main classes in the game, and while you start off as a fairly generic soldier, you soon become very unique. Snipers can call in mortar strikes. Soldiers can throw out ammo boxes for resupply. Medics can heal wounded players and even revive the recently deceased. The engineer can repair vehicles, as well as blow them up.

The ticket system is another nice feature that encourages the attacking team to press forward at all times. Each death on the attackers team results in the loss of one ticket. Given that you only start off with 100 tickets, and you gain tickets by destroying M-COM stations, you had better lock and load soldier.

The beta isn’t quite there though; servers don’t display ping, sound issues, crashes, and there are a whole host of little niggles and annoyances. However, these are small issues in a huge game, and I am confident that by the time the game is released on March 5th, most, if not all, of these problems will be addressed.

Until then, stay tuned!

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