Bad Company 2: Worst launch ever?

And another thing
As disappointed as we are that the supposed 'Modern Warfare 2' killer is, at this stage, not worth the effort, we're also alarmed by the flaw this launch has exposed in game reviewing at large. And it's do with the effort that most game reviewers - us included, at times - to get their reviews out as early and as close to launch as possible.

Here's how the system works: there's usually a long cycle of preview code builds, and then review code, sent out to reviewers, but that review code is rarely actual retail copies. It comes straight from the CD replicators, and can often be in an eager reviewers hands weeks before launch. This is great, as it you get timely reviews. It's bad, though, because you're never actually able to play the game as truly intended; for instance, there's usually no servers set up for online play, and if there are, they're not under load, and not heavily populated.

If you look at the review scores for Bad Company 2, the game looks like a runaway success: it's rating 89 on Metacritic, and many review sites and titles scored it well higher. The common theme through all of them is the incredible multiplayer... and a lot of these reviews were unveiled on the day of launch, which means those reviewers were done with the game before the launch issues ever sprung up.

Coincidentally, Atomic got around this through sheer dumb luck - a screw-up at the replicators meant that our activation code didn't work, and we had to wait for retail code to arrive before we could review it (which will appear in our next issue, by the way). So we suspect that our experience of the game is vastly different to that of most reviewers. 

Some sites, like Gamespy, have talked up the server issues in recent days, but despite an editorial that adds "... the title was noticeably marred by the problems plaguing online play", the initial Gamespy reviews do not reflect that opinion. Probably because its reviews started appearing on March 2. No where has the review - which gave the game 4.5 stars - mention that the game is 'noticeably marred'.

Put simply, this game does not - at time of writing - deserve such high scores. When online problems impinge on a game as much as in this case, and that game is an online title, those problems are not external coincidences. They are the game.

But what do we, as reviewers, do about that? It's a sad fact that if you miss a launch review on a big title, your opinion on it simply gets delivered too late to actually inform anyone. The awful flipside is that if you stand your moral ground and only review exactly the same product as every other gamer, and when a game's full online infrastructure is in place, then you will be 'late' and no one will care that you're panning something when everyone else praised it a month or more ago.

So I'd like to ask you guys, the gamers who look to reviews before investing in a title. What's the best deal: timely, but possibly inaccurate reviews, or later, more rigorous reviews?