Battlefield 3 Review

• Developer: DICE
• Publishers: Electronic Arts
• Platforms: PC, Playstation 3, Xbox 360
• Genres: Action, First Person Shooter, War
• Release Dates: October 25th 2011

This review is for the Xbox 360 version of the game.

The year-of-the-trilogy continues it’s unstoppable rampage with this installment of DICE’s grand war sim, and with it comes a horde of gun-starved XP hounds desperate to put some lead straight into the face of their fellow gamer. Unless you’ve been living under a mountain, you’ll know that Battlefield has been locked in a bitter conflict with a certain other FPS franchise, each clamouring for your hard-earned cash like a pair of dogs begging for a bit of delicious sandwich. So, does Battlefield 3 put up enough of a fight to usurp the crown of Call of Duty? Will the ‘little kids’ (sigh) who remain loyal to Activision’s Gun-toting series feel like they’re missing something truly special if they don’t give Battlefield a spin?

This looks like it should be exciting. It isn't.

First things first, the campaign mode. It says a lot that the Single Player element of the game is confined to the slightly dank recesses of ‘Disc 2′, and it’s telling of the regard in which DICE hold this part of the game. They fully expect most of their fanbase to ignore it entirely, and jump straight into the vast wilderness of the multiplayer – and they’re probably right to a degree – but what about the players who are on board for some solo action? What do they get?

Put bluntly, they get a poorly paced, clumsy and catastrophically dumb five hours of rubbish, littered with constant moments of missed glory and horrendous Quick Time Events (including one that sees you stab a rat in the head). DICE seem to have gone to massive efforts to make this as realistic as possible, along the way forgetting that real war isn’t very exciting at all – in fact, it’s kind of boring. The realisation of how bored I actually was came quite early in the game – probably around an hour and a half, maybe – when you’re teased with the notion of piloting a fighter jet. You slowly make your way up to the deck of an aircraft carrier, following who you assume to be your co-pilot as he babbles about something or other. You don’t really care what he’s saying because you’re about to fly a motherfucking jet, right? Wrong. Your character jumps into the secondary seat of the aircraft and buckles you in for the most inane, stale and flat-out tedious on-rails mission I think I’ve ever played.

Arbitrary QTE's plague the Campaign, and do little to keep you on the edge of your seat.

Over the course of the campaign you’ll flick back and forth between several characters (Call of Duty style – and that’s not the only similarity) as they play their specific part in the unfolding narrative. Only problem is, the actual narrative is about as interesting and exciting as one of Michael Bay’s very worst brain-farts, with dialogue and set-pieces to match. One of the campaigns most fundamental flaws is its strict linearity; if you don’t do exactly what Battlefield wants you to do, you’re either reprimanded with a shameful ‘out of bounds’ countdown, forcing you to get back on track, or you’re simply killed and re-started from a checkpoint.

It turns certain sections into a frustrating game of trial and error, really detracting from any sense of enjoyment, making this a campaign that needs some serious work if it wants to stay relevant. Don’t get me wrong – it still looks and sounds fucking fantastic, thanks to the new Frostbite 2 engine – but despite a strong final act it has neither the panache, the bombast or the sheer thrill of even Call of Duty‘s weakest campaigns. Thankfully though, it’s not all your getting for your money, and what Battlefield has to offer with it’s online play is frankly unrivalled.

As soon as you dip your toes into Battlefield‘s multiplayer, you realise exactly why it can never be truly compared to any other shooter, at least not in any productive way. DICE’s efforts are in a league of their own, unlike anything else out there – and whether the particularly methodical pace and scale is a good thing remains essentially down to you as an individual. What I can tell you though, is exactly what I love and hate about it.

Runnin' n' Gunnin' isn't what Battlefield online is all about.

Focus has very much been shifted to team play in Battlefield 3. There are now huge bonuses for providing your team-mates with ammo, health or repairs, and you can normally net near 500 xp for the capture of a single flag if you attack as a wolf-pack. A brand new ‘Suppression Assist’ mechanic encourages covering your allies when they’re in trouble; basically, firing near an enemy will cause their vision to blur, and if they die while in this state you’ll recieve a hefty bonus for doing little more than hindering the enemy. It’s a smart way to coerce players to help each other instead of going Rambo, and having a token effect like suppression directly affect the enemy player without actually hurting them is a small but hugely rewarding detail.  Being a team player ensures your experience will be vastly more rewarding than if you just went for kills, a trait any multiplayer game should aspire to have.

Veterans of the series will be pleased whether they are migrating from the original PC games or the Bad Company series, since Battlefield 3 takes the good from both wheelhouses and combines them into a super-multiplayer that never ceases to be exciting. There are a few game modes to choose from, chief within them are Bad Company‘s ‘Rush’ mode and the more traditional Conquest mode. Rush is an attack and defend mission, where the aggressors must fight through the enemy and plant explosives on Comm Stations – a successful capture will result in the defenders falling back across the map, while the attackers usurp that base as a new spawn point. This mode, while not my favourite of the two, has seen a very welcome change in how it works since Bad Company 2. Comm Stations can no longer be felled with brute force; a charge has to be set and defended for it to count, so sitting a mile away pummeling the buildings with tank shells won’t work this time around.

This epic free-fall is the single most exciting thing about the campaign, and it's not even in the campaign.

The most impressive aspect of Rush is it’s level design – the demands of the game mode means the maps are usually meticulously planned step by step, often changing setting entirely by the time the last Comm Station is reached. A particular high point (and probably the most exciting multiplayer map in gaming history -bold, I know) is a little map called ‘Damavand Peak’. Take two sets of defenders comms out and they will be pushed to a base at the bottom of the mountain, with the only way down being an enormous and pant-stainingly awesome base-jump.

Conquest is where Battlefield’s sensibilities are most at home. Focusing on the capture of three or four flags on a map, Conquest rounds are huge, lengthy, epic and completely unpredictable from minute to minute. Each team is assigned ‘tickets’, which basically represent a timer. Everytime someone dies, your team will lose a ticket, but if an enemy controls more than half of the flags, you will also bleed tickets over time. Vehicle combat is far more pivotal in Conquest, and most of the time there will be two conflicts going on in one round; an infantry battle with tanks, snipers and jeeps whizzing around the map, but also a completely peripheral air battle happening above you.

Jets and helicopters scream over you as you fight, and knowing those aren’t scripted sequences but actual people, is pretty awe-inspiring. The only issue I have with the aircraft is the fact that I completely suck at them – and I don’t think that’s necessarily my fault. I’m sure if I had the chance to practice, I could become a bone fide Maverick in an F-15, but the lack of any sort of training mode or sandbox means I have to practice in the middle of matches. I have to be that asshole who spawns in a jet and immediately plunges it into the sea, because i’ve never flown one before. Even if you do get in the air and stay there, you’ll invariably be shot down almost immediately by Iceman and his gang, who weave through the air like they’re playing Quidditch. It’s very much a baptism by fire, but it really didn’t have to be. Remember that single-player jet level I mentioned earlier? Why not make that a semi-disguised Jet tutorial for multiplayer? It just doesn’t make sense to me.

DICE sure know how to create some lovely lighting effects.

The huge, in-depth levelling system should keep you busy for the lifespan of the game, but the worryingly guff campaign and incidental co-op missions won’t really factor into the experience as much as they perhaps should. There was an opportunity here for DICE to claim superiority in every realm of the modern shooter, but instead they only knocked one of the three pitches out of the park.  Some wacky ragdoll, framerate issues and texture pop are clear and present in the console versions of the campaign, but naturally one would assume the PC version will encounter these far less often.

A massive install-able texture pack comes on the disc for console versions, and if you choose not to install – or simply don’t have a memory unit large enough to do so – you’ll be stuck with the budget version of the textures, which are far less impressive than you might have expected.

Multiplayer also has its faults, mainly down to some nasty clipping, horrendous matchmaking, fragile server stability and issues across the board when ‘squadding up’ with your friends – all things EA claim to be fixing, but still remain broken at time of writing. I’m not sure blaming ‘too many players’ holds much water for a release as big as this, and it feels sort of like a game that was released before it was actually totally ready. The old Battlefield problem of not being able to back out of a server between rounds also rears it’s ugly head once more, despite being a major sore point for players in the last few games.

Frustrating though they are, these issues never quite dull the shine of Battlefield‘s underlying quality. This is a game that should satisfy anyone looking for a truly great online shooter.  The ability to spawn on any member of your four or five man squad means you’re never far away from some kind of fight, which helps keep up fast-paced and always riveting experience. Battlefield‘s biggest achievement lies in it’s depiction of a real theater of war, with DICE’s undisputable mastery as sound designers kicking in every time a grenade explodes, a tank fires a round or a jet sonic-booms through the sky.

In the immortal words of Harbinger from Hot Shots: Part Deux:

“War… It’s fantastic!”