Review: Battlefield 3: Battlefield or Cabbage Patch

As you may have guessed from the title, today I will be reviewing Battlefield 3. Now, i find games hard things to review, mainly because i find myself having way too much fun and not really paying attention to the aspects I should be reviewing, which obviously is a problem. Battlefield 3 was no exception. In fact, if was totally honest, this review nearly didn’t happen because i spent so much time playing it. When you can do things like parachute out of a chopper right in to an enemy stronghold, kill the resistance, and then capture the base, or barrel across fields in a tank, demolishing any building that stands in your way, while unloading HEAT rounds on enemy vehicles, well it’s easy to see why. The question on everyone’s lips, however, is “Is Battlefield 3 any good?”

 

Read on to find out.

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When you first run Battlefield 3 you are presented with a new form of web based interface called Battlelog. Battlelog replaces most of the traditional menus you would expect to see when you first run a game, but it also doubles as social network for Battlefield players. You can browse player profiles, view player statics and unlocks, and manage your friends list. Personally, I don’t like it. I find it hard to use, poorly laid out, and pretty buggy (I’ll talk more about that later). I do see what EA and DICE have tried to do, but it doesn’t really work. Using a more traditional UI would have avoided a lot of the complications Battlelog has introduced, and I also can’t help but wonder if the memory wasted by having a web browser open all the time would have been better used if it was available to the game itself.

Once I had muddled through Battlelog I went for the main campaign. I am Sergeant Blackburn, and I start the game looking over a bridge at an oncoming New York subway train. As the train passes underneath me, I jump the barrier, land on the roof of the train, smash in the back window, and proceed to the front shooting – with extreme precision – anything that presents the slightest hint of threat to my personal preservation. Once I reach the front of the train I am transported back in time, 8 hours previously. I am being interrogated by 2 CIA operatives…. Hang on! This is very Call of Duty Black Ops! And herein lie the problems. As I have said before, I do like on rails shooters – hell I grow up on them – Battlefield 3 never gets any less linear than a Rolled Steel Joist, to the point where it develops an almost genocidal attitude towards you. For example, if you miss a quick time event, you’re dead! If you’re too slow progressing through a level and lose your squad, you’re dead! It will even kill you if you refuse to pick the “correct” choice in the much touted moment of moral greyness. Then there’s the game play. It basically ends up playing exactly the same as all Call of Duty games since Modern Warfare. You know the drill – dramatic kick off into cut scene, into corridor shooter, into set piece, into the mandatory vehicle section and finally to another cut scene (which absolutely must be shocking, gratuitous and memorable), then repeat, at least once. I want to say there are some memorable sections in the game, but, if I was to be honest, the only sections I do remember are the thunder run campaign (because it was featured at E3 last year) and the very lack lustre ending.

The thing is I can’t help but feel that the main campaign could have been so much better. DICE made big waves about how they had come up with a CoD beater and how Frostbite 2 was going to create new standards of visual quality. What actually happened is they effectively cloned Call of Duty: Black Ops – which is in itself THE worst FPS I have played in my life. Actually that’s not fair. I’ve played Duke Nukem Forever – and made a game engine so power hungry that most people I know would need to spend a lot of money on upgrading their rigs so they could play it at its best.

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Ah yes, Battlefield at its best. Image this: you’re at the base of a volcano, in a small, tropical wood. You have your trusty rifle in hand but you are low on ammo. You are hiding behind a rock waiting for your squad to back you up. You hear a rustling in the bushes behind you. You spin 180 degrees and see an enemy soldier lining up his rifle with your head. You double tap the trigger of your weapon and here a click. You can’t help but say “OH CRAP!!” out load while switching to your side arm. As you do so there’s a snap of a round whizzing past your head. You tap the trigger of your pistol, there’s a dull pop, then a thud and a strange but warm feeling of relief. This is the multiplayer. This is battlefield 3. The singularly most epic, beautiful, jaw dropping and varied experience I have ever had as a PC gamer.

The multiplayer has 3 basic modes, Conquest and Rush, which make a return from Bad Company 2 and Team Deathmatch (a modified version of Squad Deathmatch from Bad Company 2). Now I have to admit that as I write this I haven’t played the deathmatch mode, but if I wanted to play Team Deathmatch I could play any one of the other multiplayer shooters that are out there. Battlefield is not about deathmatch, it’s about all out war and in conquest mode on a full 64 player server it feels exactly like that, and with the return of Jets to the franchise you get the intriguing and stunning dynamic of having both aerial and ground battles going on simultaneously. It’s so spectacular that I am seriously struggling to find words to describe it.

Conquest mode is all about the capture of territory and the struggle to hold it. It is basically a very large scale game of capture the flag, but with all the destruction and violence going on around you it never feels so simple. Rush is a little more linear. The objective is to progress forward through the maps by pushing back the enemy. This is done by destroying Mobile communications units (or M-COM’S) of which there are 2 at each stage. One of the things I love about this game is that the different game modes actually make a huge difference to how the game plays.

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With all this glowing praise I bet I have you thinking the multiplayer is perfect, but it is far from it. There are too few of the large and open maps, and the ones that aren’t are guilty of too often forcing teams in to choke points where the only way for a team to progress is to, quite frankly, get lucky. Operation Metro and Grand Bazaar are the worst offenders but there are others. Also, I really do dislike the fact that in Battlefield 3 the assault and medic classes have been merged. The merge has ruined the vital role the medic played to keeping a squad alive and also distracts assault players from their primary tasks: killing bad guys and taking objectives. I also think the unlock progression is too slow. Especially for players that are coming to the game so long after launch. It puts them at a distinct disadvantage and makes leveling even harder.

Then there are the bugs. I have to say that most of the launch issues have been ironed out, but for me three still remain. Firstly, completely at random while trying to connect to a server I will be told that I have been logged out of Origin, and if I have the Steam client running in the background I will either be told I have been kicked from the server I was trying to join or just “OOOPS! Something went wrong”. Now I do understand that sometimes that will be issues with connection attempts, that’s just a part of online gaming, but I would hate to think EA are somehow covertly trying to keep users off of Steam in an attempt to win the concurrent users contest. Especially as people like me have a very large list of friends that use Steam but pretty much none of them use Origin. I am – at the same time – forced to highlight that the Origin EULA states that by using Origin you are granting EA access to all of the files on your computer for the purposes of statistical analysis. Make of that what you will but I personally really don’t like it.

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[tab name = “Conclusion”]

So is Battlefield 3 a good game? And is it really a Call of Duty killer? Well, the main campaign is a disaster. So bad that I’m am convinced that DICE is actually not responsible for it. Looking at the credits would seem to support this. Need for Speed: The Run developers, Black Box, and Medal of Honor developers, Danger Close, (amongst others) both had hands in the development of Battlefield 3 and after playing both The Run and MOH, I’m pretty sure one or both are to blame. The multiplayer though is where Battlefield has and will hopefully always shine. Even though this is the 11^th game in the franchise, DICE have done a brilliant job of keeping the multiplayer feeling fresh. There are similarities to Bad Company 2, such as the visual updates and the addition of jets, but added to the amazingly grand scale and wonderful variation you get in each and every match, is Battlefield 3 a Call of Duty killer? Well…. No…. not really. CoD and Battlefield, while both being first person shooters, are entirely different types of game. The impatient players will pick Call of Duty due, largely, to its fast paced, high action game play but Battlefield will suit the kind of person that likes to play with a team to achieve a goal and isn’t fussed about their kills to deaths ratio. It is definitely one to install just for the many, many awesome moments you will experience in Conquest mode, but be aware that you need at least Windows Vista to be able to even install it, and to get the most out of Frostbite 2, you will need a pretty high end PC.

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