The DRM & patch issues warrant further examination: the game has a ‘one install active at a time’ policy. That seems strict, but in reality it is more reasonable than the ‘5 and done’ system used by EA. First off, if you install the game and don’t activate it, you are essentially getting a 24-hour full-featured demo. This is a great compromise, since it lets you have a full feel for the game, and since you cannot nearly complete the campaign in 24 hours anyway it really does work as a demo. Once you choose to activate, the game is locked to that particular PC, meaning that you need to uninstall to ‘revoke’ the activation before installing on another PC or selling/trading the game. Patching the game has proven interesting - I pretty much lost a weekend of potential gaming to the process. After downloading ~1.2GB of files, I had to wait hours while they authenticated everything, then a while longer for the actual patching process to complete. Then I had to repeat it for the second patch. So after installing the game on a Friday and downloading the patches on Saturday morning, I would visit my PC occasionally on Saturday and Sunday until I got everything patched up before finally starting. I can only imagine how I would feel if there had been problems!

At this point you are probably wondering how I manage to start things this way and end up with a ‘Buy It’ recommendation! Well, read on and see...​