Check out our Battlefield 3 multiplayer review
Campaign review – By R.J. Jones
Battlefield 3′s single player campaign can really be summed up with one word: uninspired.
This 5-hour campaign is nothing more than a tack-on to the multiplayer. The story is your basic cliche military shooter. Nukes, Iran, Russians and New York, told in a flashback-and-interrogation style that’s far too reminiscent of Call of Duty: Black Ops for my liking. You take control of Blackburn, a quasi-renegade soldier who – despite his talkative nature during the interrogation – is strangely mute during actual gameplay. Occasionally, you’ll be dragged out of this role and relive occasional flashbacks from other characters who also don’t speak, give no backstory and are largely irrelevant to events. It’s a jagged narrative that doesn’t do anything notable and failed to get me interested.
The whole thing plays strictly to a script. Essentially, the game is going on around you and largely without any need for you. It’s your job to follow the appropriate people, go to the right places and do what you can not to die. For the most part, little input is needed. The whole thing is so heavily scripted that anything you do which isn’t commanded by the game (shoot this tank, snipe that enemy, etc.) is redundant. Often enemies will respawn ad infinitum until either you reach a certain point or so much time elapses. In these moments, you can just crawl to the right spot or sit back and let the time expire. Other times, your team is scripted to win, so you can usually stand around and let your invulnerable teammates do the killing for you.
The scripting really takes hold when you’re thrown into the many quick-time events the campaign has to offer. They’re obviously set up, out of place, simplistic and disengaging. They’re supposed to be there to draw you in, but what they really do is ruin the tempo and drag you out of your role. The same goes for the plane and tank levels, which are slow, play out around you and don’t really require any attention.
Even the details are scripted. Teammates will get behind certain cover, and if you’re there first they’ll push you out of the way to get to their spot. Enemy AI are scripted bots with targeting mods. They grab the same cover, do the same things, show no initiative other than what they’re scripted to do and are clearly just there to be killed. The game plays like an on-rails shooter, but without any need to actually engage the combat.
Speaking of cover, the game lacks any solid cover system. This wouldn’t be such a problem if your teammates and enemies weren’t so reliant on it, or if the objects supposed to provide cover did so effectively. The hit detection system is glitchy. Poles and scaffolding will sometimes provide an enemy better protection than the rock you’re crouched behind. The inability to interact with the cover around you detracts from the realism the game tries to achieve. Add to this enemies that fly 10 feet in the air once they die or fully recovering from a bullet in the stomach but dying from a shin-shot, and you have a campaign that hasn’t put the pieces together like it should.
Battlefield 3 gives a good illusion of realism. Guns are accurate, the sound is fantastic, characters talk the right way and the missions play out in the way you’d expect from a military shooter. The problem is this doesn’t feel real. The heavy reliance on script, along with the array of glitches and flaws, remind you that this is just a game. You can skip this. There’s nothing of value here.
Pros
- Accurate guns
- Realistic sound/graphics
- Militaristic
Cons
- Style over substance
- Heavily scripted
- Short
3/10
If you have to play this, get it pre-owned.
Multiplayer Review – By Richard Jones
Battlefield games have long been known for their vast maps and huge battles filled with tanks, helicopters, aeroplanes, infantry and APC’s. However, this is much less the case in Battlefield 3 as it was in Battlefield 2 and Bad Company (2). The focus seems to have shifted to being more of a corridor shooter. Vehicles, a previous staple of Battlefield, are powered up but drastically reduced, with some maps having none at all. You might say that this is an attempt to ‘CoDify’ Battlefield, but you could also say that DICE are simply trying to bring more gunplay into the game, and if this was their motivation it’s certainly worked.
The ‘CoDifying’ of Battlefield doesn’t stop at the reduction of vehicles. Health has been greatly reduced, allowing you to be killed with only a few well-placed shots. This not only adds to the realism but it also greatly speeds up the gameplay. People aren’t afraid to shoot somewhat hopefully across a map and get a kill with a few fortunate shots. You have to think carefully, as you can’t run around blindly from cover to cover without being picked off.
Battlefield games have often been complained as feeling clunky and poor. Battlefield 3 doesn’t. The guns feel right and they have their power and kick. It takes skill to aim, more so than in other first person shooters. Burst fire is a necessity with the emphasis on long-range combat, and DICE incorporate this nicely with the ability to change your fire mode to fully automatic, burst fire or semi-automatic, something I haven’t seen since Rainbow Six: Vegas.
Another new mechanic is suppressive fire. If you shoot near an enemy but don’t actually hit them you still get points for assisting in the kill. If you’re on the opposite end of suppression with bullets flying passed your head and hitting your cover, then your screen will shake, suffer from slight blur effects and the saturation decreases. It may not sound like much, but it certainly adds to the experience of making you feel like you’re under pressure. Accompanied with the reduced health, it can make being the victim of suppressive fire quite a scary thing, causing you to cower behind cover waiting for a chance to dash to a safe spot, desperately trying to find your nearest team mates.
I personally feel that the map design in Battlefield 3 maps is somewhat poor, resulting in much less class variety. In Bad Company 2 you could be any class on any map and be effective if used correctly. In Battlefield 3, snipers and engineers can be rendered useless due to the lack of vehicles or long sight-lines, usually ending with teams stuffed with medics and support units. The Rush gametype isn’t particularly suited to many of the maps and the ones that work well are often extremely difficult for the attacking side due to various unavoidable bottlenecks. The worst of these is on the Grand Bazaar map. Here, when you move up to the third set of objectives you are more or less forced to funnel through a single doorway whilst the defenders sit back and mow you down as you scramble through trying to stay alive.
One of the biggest parts of modern FPS titles is their unlockables. Nowadays, everything needs to be unlocked, from guns to attachments, perks, vehicle upgrades. The weapons customisation is second to none, with the ability to put on 3 different attachments including a sight, an underbarrel and an extra (such as a silencer), and each type of gun has some unique attachments. But DICE take it a bit too far, forcing you to unlock equipment that is necessary to do your role in the team. For example, when starting as a medic, until you gain your first level you aren’t allowed to access defibrillators, which are (in my opinion) the most important tool in your arsenal. This lack of equipment can make it extremely difficult to get your first few level ups and some better guns and attachments. Most other players will already have these things and are greatly more powerful simply because they have played the game more or owned the game longer than you have. The same goes for vehicles. The upgrades for jets include air to ground bombs, flares and air to air missiles. Until you get these things, your time as a pilot is spent mostly as a sitting duck.
Battlefield 3 can produce some incredible graphics, especially on the PC. You can still destroy the environment around you, but not as much as in Bad Company 2. The focus is to destroy walls and segments of buildings. This allows for it to be far more atmospheric and seem more impressive. There is nothing more adrenaline fueling than charging towards an enemy objective with a few team mates while huge chunks of debris and concrete are raining down on you from a building being destroyed by a tank or RPG. On the opposite side of things, there’s nothing more terrifying than seeing your cover destroyed and finding yourself instantly out in the open and disorientated by enemy fire. It’s an excellent way to flush out window campers which have been the bane of most shooters in recent years.
However, some things which may look gorgeous can be a real hinderance when actually playing. Lens flare will light my screen up like a christmas tree on fire and shows a poor choice of graphics quality and realism over gameplay. Some maps are worse than others, but on numerous occations I found myself being shot at and not being able to see or sometimes even look in the direction of the shooter.
PC players will find the chat box a hindrance. With voice chat being less common on PC, a good text chat system can really make the difference when it comes to team play and communication. So you’d expect a hugely team-based game like Battlefield to have an exceptional text chat system with little to no flaws, right?
Wrong.
The text chat does have good points. You can talk to your squad, team or everybody on the server through the simple presses of ‘J’, ‘K’ or ‘L’. However, the text appears in a ghastly big blue box that takes up the right hand side of your screen. The size is dependent on your resolution. On 1920-1080p it’s not that large and is pretty forgiveable, but on lower resolutions, even ones as high as 1280-720p, it can take up nearly the whole right hand side of your screen. If anyone decides to spam the text chat, your screen takes on a mighty blind spot and game-rage soon follows.
As expected, the amount of customisation is fantastic on the PC. Every button can be remapped and the graphics options are phenomenal. You can turn almost anything on/off and up/down in quality (except, of course, the chat box and lens flair). I would have liked the option to carry over your settings from the beta, but this was never likely to happen.
Strangely though, DICE have decided to deny you the opportunity to change your settings or button configuration when waiting for a respawn. Pressing ESC does nothing whilst you’re dead. Instead, you are forced to watch the player who just killed you, front on, just like Bad Company 1 and 2. I’m not sure why they still think it’s a good idea. You have to wait until you have respawned to adjust your settings, forcing me to do so when I should be playing the game and helping my team out. In fairness, this is only really an issue for the first few games you play. Once you get your options set how you like them, it’s no longer a problem.
Finally, we come to Battlelog, the web based server browser everyones been waiting to hate. But I’m going to tell you that it’s not that bad. It’s the same as being able to use an in game server browser, which is what confuses me. Why make it? All it seems to do is to require you to have an internet connection to play single player. It doesn’t have any benefits to an in game browser, only a few flaws, such as closing and re-opening the game just to join another server. Personally I haven’t had any major problems with it and no difficulty joining servers. The whole thing just seems redundant and only serves to create a small nuisance from something that didn’t need fixing.
In conclusion, despite having some hiccups and mishaps along the way, Battlefield 3 is a well polished game that has had all the bug fixes that it needed to have from the beta. It is extremely fun, it has great variety, jawdropping moments, heartstoppingly intense endings to games, some WTF moments that are usually caused by some outrageous piloting, and is the most fun you can have on a first person shooter to date.
Pros
- Huge 32-32 battles
- Guns feel excellent
- Vehicles are unbelievable fun
- Tonnes of customisation
Cons
- Battlelog is unnecessary
- Blinding lens flare
- Text chat hinders vision
- Options are unchangeable whilst dead
9/10
Well worth full price. iLeetism recommended.
