I just finished the BC2 single-player campaign. The whole thing comes off as a very blatant attempt to challenge Modern Warfare 2 for its turf, and it does a decent job of it. I was disappointed by MW2, so I really wanted it to be better. But there's a few really annoying failures:
-Visibility. Half the time my vision is almost totally obscured by snow glare or (more frequently) dust and smoke. Firing blindly into an opaque cloud until everyone's dead isn't fun. This is even worse during the driving sequences, where you're driving down a narrow road with someone in front of you kicking up so much dust that your screen is completely obscured. It's annoying as hell.
-Combat in general. In both BC2 and MW2 you're a subordinate member of a small squad. BUT. MW2 tends to be very well-structured--as long as you follow orders, stay behind cover when your boss says to stay back, and advance when you're told, you're generally going to be successful.
In BC2, your squadmates seem to shout orders at random--they'll tell you to "find cover" when the enemy is suppressed and you should be moving up. The most annoying example of this is when you fight the two helicopters in the middle of the desert. Your squadmate tells you he'll take care of the infantry while you take down the helicopters, but when you start to fight the helicopters, he'll scream that he needs help with the infantry. It took me four tries to realize that if you try to help with the infantry, the helicopter will kill you, and that ignoring him was the best option.
Lastly, I lost count of the number of times I was injured, tried to duck behind the only cover that didn't get shot to pieces in a few seconds, and died anyway. Between grenades, grenade launchers, and various other high-powered weaponry the enemies shoot at you, I found it incredibly easy to die without even knowing why. The "grenade warning indicator" is a nice feature cribbed from Call of Duty, but it's so tiny that I didn't even notice it existed until 2/3 of the way through the game. In CoD, even when combat was frustrating, when I died I could usually tell what I did wrong. BC2 seemed chaotic and random, and a lot of times when I DID make it through a section it seemed like luck more than anything (especially the scenes where you run through artillery fire).
-Characterization and writing. This is a weird thing to compare, because MW2 has next to no characterization to speak of, but it's pretty convincing. BC2, on the other hand, ASPIRES to be quirky and over-the-top, but it never quite takes. Sweetwater, Hags, Flynn and the Sergeant all seem to have been written and performed by people who have had these character stereotypes DESCRIBED to them, but never actually seen them before. Everything about the Texan guy's delivery in particular screams "hey...is this a good Texan impression? It's funny, right?" Flynn's even worse. His whole character is that...he's a hippie. In the army. Crazy! Except not really, especially since they chuck the whole pacifist thing as soon as it becomes inconvenient for gameplay. And then kill him off before the player has a chance to become attached to him. Oh well. The whole story had that vibe to it--sort of a general sketch of a story, where they never went back and fleshed it out so that people would actually care about it.
-What the hell is going on? This was a question I had a lot of the time. Like when we were in the desert, looking for the ship. Some guy says "so why the hell is this ship in the desert?" As we drive past a ship in the desert. Except it turns out that's not the ship we're looking for. There's a whole bunch of ships out here. Why are any of them in the desert? If it was explained, I never picked it up.
Immediately afterward you do a weird thing where you go to 3 bases and use consoles, for some reason. I had no idea what was being done there, either. Or, for example, why the US military was unable to intercept and shoot down a cargo plane flying from Bolivia to Texas. Even if they DIDN'T know it was coming. The whole plot seems kind of scribbled out with possibly even LESS thought than the corny MW2 storyline.
-General polish. This is unfair, because BC2 didn't have anywhere near the budget of MW2, but it's still significant. BC2's animations are a whole tier below MW2's, and I saw a lot of Mass Effect 2-style glitches, with characters materializing half a second after a cutscene starts. The character models are okay, but everyone besides the 5 main characters (like Aguire, the russian guy, and the General) seems to have almost exactly the same face. They look like Sims or something.
That said, it had a lot of good points--the level design is some of the best I've ever seen in a game (par for the course for DICE), the gunplay is enjoyable when I'm not being blown up by invisible grenades or shooting through dust, and the vehicles are very well implemented. Overall the campaign is just more fun than MW2. It does all MW2's flashy set-pieces, except better. I haven't tried the multiplayer yet since I'm using a borrowed copy of the game, but it looks incredibly good. DICE definitely knows how to milk the Battlefield formula.
It's got more problems than I'd hoped, but for me, it's hugely less disappointing than MW2 was.
