Single shots
During the single-player campaign your avatar is, for the most part, Sergeant Henry Blackburn, a soldier who’s interrogation by US military police fuels the episodic drip feed of missions. Considering EA want this to be a Call of Duty killer, it feels all too familiar to last year’s CoD: Black Ops setup and so never particularly piques the interest. That’s despite the constant world-shattering events which rival even the most action-packed days in the life of Jack Bauer.
American graffiti
Predictably, there’s the level where you’ll be primarily sniping, another where you’ll slog through the narrow confines of an office, and another which sees you in a huge engagement across a frenzied warzone. As I say, it's FPS by numbers. Battlefield 3 at least tries something different by including vehicles, essential for their multiplayer use – which I’ll get to – and also interesting enough during the campaign as you take the fight to the enemy in tank, jet and helicopter.
With or without vehicles, there’s no escaping how tightly scripted Battlefield 3's action sequences are and how shackled its fire fights. It’s obvious why developer Dice plumped for such strictness: after all, most of the jaw-dropping sections used across those aforementioned TV spots are the products of such scripts.
So long and tanks for all...
However, with such funnelling present during combat – no matter how open the battleground might appear – the lack of tactical options hurts the gameplay. You’re essentially left playing through what might as well be, to all intents and purposes, an on-rails shooter.
Thankfully, where the single-player experience limits, the multiplayer aspect expands, allowing for a staggering amount of attacking strategies, weapon combinations and approaches. The only real limiting factor is how much you put into it: Battlefield 3 rewards you with ever more intricate weapons and additions the more you play. But it can be initially bewildering in its ebb and flow.
Get up, get busy, do it
No other game quite captures a full-blown war – at least the popularised perception of such an encounter – like Battlefield 3. I’m sure that PC owners pity their console-owning counterparts like poor relations, but Dice has worked wonders given that the maximum number of players per map is just 24 on consoles, but 64 on the PC version.
Next page: Friendly fire
COMMENTS
Sorry but I won't be buying this one
At least not until LAN play is once again on the table.
EA has been continuously constraining the Battlefield franchise. In BF 1942 (the first title), you could have your LAN server, with bots if you wanted (ie not all human players) and you could choose among whatever factions were available for fighting on the map of your choice (one size).
This situation remained in the series up to and including BF Vietnam (the last patch of which controlled the foliage option for the bots and made the game a real pleasure). Then we got BF2, and the options diminished.
In BF2, you could choose map sizes to correspond to your number of players. A great option, until you found out that said option was not available for LAN players, only for official (pay-for) servers. LAN servers (ie your server) could only run the small maps for 16 players.
That was corrected by some community map makers who did a bang-up job of saying "screw that" and made the huge 64-player maps available for LAN play, with bots.
Then, of course, there was the progression system, not available for LAN players at all because you had to be on a public server to be able to use it. In itself, it was not really a problem, except that your LAN server would not allow you to play with stuff you hadn't unlocked on public servers. So you had the incredible situation of being forced to use the basic (lame) weapons on your private server. Why not the best ones ? To force you to play on public servers, of course.
So the community once again rolled up its sleeves and birthed a personal ranking server for BF2. Then the war started. With each patch and major update, EA did something that would break the personal server functionality, and the intelligent people behind said server would toil day and night to produce a patch to the ranking server in record time.
In the end, it became simply ridiculous.
Finally, with BF2 gone was the time where you could choose the factions for the maps. They were hard-coded into the map rules. Sure, there is certainly some very good explanation for that, but let's be realistic, hmm ? If they could do it in the previous versions, there really isn't any technical problem with making such freedom of choice available in BF2. I think it was to avoid certain "political" issues, like peoply whinging over the fact that some public server had Euro forces fighting against US Marines.
Now EA has entirely removed the LAN option. Maybe it's temporary (because that happened in BF2 as well, and EA relented with a patch), maybe it isn't. But one thing is certain : EA is once again doing everything it can to lock down the game and prevent people from enjoying it the way they want to. And I do not want to be subject to the mind-numbing amount of griefers and morons that infest public servers like lice.
With BF2 I did the resistance thing. I installed the official patches, and went hunting for the private ranking server patches. My friends and I played BF2 and the patch game for over two years. We had loads of fun, even though 58 out of 64 players were bots. Maybe even because of that.
I will not submit to the same shenanigans again. If EA does not open up BF3, allow LAN parties and private ranking servers, then fine. What it means is that BF3 is not a game for me and I will not buy it or play it.
The promotional material is stunning, for sure, but my friends and I have other games that are fun to play and don't limit us on purpose.
We'll find the Frostbite engine in some other game that is more gamer-friendly anyway.
I would say a few things against it
The 360 version looks unbelievably bad without the texture pack - we're talking N64 quality textures in places, just checking out review sites.
The PC version doesn't have LAN play or bots, and requires EA's shite.
Because of the above, pass.
Which is why you play on a console where you've already signed away all rights to the data it can get hold of.
Too bad no information was given about the necessity to install spyware on your computer to play Battlefield 3. Origin scours the computer to see if it can find any personal data to peruse.
I wouldn't go as far as awesome.
Average, more like.
No arguments about multi-player - it is brilliant in-game. The part that totally negates that piece of awesomeness for me are the loooong load times, and - even worse - the fact that you can only quit the game in-game, and not between game sessions. WFT?!?
