It was playable. It did not contain the campaign mode though. And they did not say anything about the DRM which could mean both that their early *caugh* preview version was without the DRM or that it was already installed and they just did not know by then that this was not only to protect the thing before it was launched from leaking to P2P but also to protect it till kingdom come.
Anyway, the number of review copies must be extremely limited and only a certain number of magazines seems to have access. So setting up a teeny tiny server that handles these limited connections shoudln't be a big issue. I even assume that the system is running already in full as they stated that they can dynamically assign new ressources to a game if more serverpower is needed due to higher demand. Sounds to me like a virtualisation of servers both concerning computing and storage. So right now there are just a few machines in their data center running with the DRM and on March 3rd they just pump it up a notch.