Battlefield 3

Despite having never played any of the previous Battlefield games, something about this one stood out.   In one of the early video previews, a team of soldiers cover the main character while he gets ready to deal with a sniper in a nearby building. What you’re expecting is for him to pull out a rifle and with superhuman abilities, zone in on the sniper and takes him out in a single shot.  Instead, a grenade launcher is pulled out and half of the snipers building is blown up.  That said a lot to me.  It said that this was a game that was going to take the first person shooter elements that had become a bit generic and shake them up to give us something new.  Sadly, this has not been the case.

Most of what you see in the trailers happen within the first hour of game play. You really have to wonder, when big Hollywood moments loose their impact so quickly, why do so many game publishers insist on showing so much of their games these days in the trailers.  Shooting the afore mentioned sniper with the grenade launcher should have felt better than it did simply watching it, but it had long since lost its power.

The major problem is that when the big Hollywood moments come, they have absolutely no emotional context to them.  You’re probably thinking that a first person shooter like this should be all manly and not worry about sissy things like emotion, but without any kind of emotion context, how can massive destruction hold any power?  Think about the moment in the first Modern Warfare in which you are in a Chinook, trying to get away from a city in which a nuclear bomb is about to go off. The Chinook is shot down by an RPG and your severely injured character drags himself to the edge of the it just in time to watch the nuke go off in the distance and a wall of dust and debris rush towards him.  The first time I saw that it gave me the shivers.  I never got that feeling with Battlefield 3, even though there’s definitely the potential for it.

Within the first hour of the game you get caught in the middle of an earthquake that does massive damage and brings down a nearby building.  The collapsing building could have been something terrifying but the image cuts to black far too quickly.  Considering we have seen far more harrowing imagery of this kind of thing in real life, this just comes across as weak and hollow.  Your character passes out and wakes a few hours later to the destruction the earthquake has caused which, again, we have seen in real life sadly more than once in the last year. I spent most of this level wondering why the developers even bothered with this earthquake. It doesn't bring anything to the game that wouldn't be there without it and it doesn't bring anything that should be happening. Where were the dead and injured civilians?  Where were the emergency services?  Where was the human drama?  Dice have given us nothing but the generic, bunch of soldiers waiting around in hopes an American soldier will come along.

Despite having an eighteen rating and having a lot of people (i.e enemies) get shot in a bloody fashion, when it comes to showing any kind of non soldier death, the game shies away from it.  If you never see the people you are suppose to be helping being hurt by either human violence or a natural disaster, then what are you fighting for? The closest I saw this game come to showing death up close was with a couple of team mates but I didn't care because they died off screen. I came across their bodies after I'd shot down an attack plane that was hounding the unit.  There was no emotion, there was no sense of loss.  Compare this to Bulletstorm, which on the surface is crass and immature, but because they know this, they can occasionally slip in some genuinely moving moments when the player isn’t expecting it.  The friendship between Grey and Ishi is put under strain time and time again over the course of the game, but the scene in which Ishi says “You are my brother,” is a very moving one.  When Grey looses Ishi at the end of the game, we genuinely feel for him.  Battlefield 3’s characters are so two-dimensional they may as well be cardboard cut-outs.

Game play is equally as two dimensional.  What’s really amazes me about this game and Homefront is that they both made no secret about the fact that they were going after Call of Duty. But having played both of them in the same year that I played all three Modern Warfare's I can see exactly where they have gone wrong.  Modern Warfare keeps you entertained all the time.  Even in the quieter moments it keeps you engaged and in the louder moments it gives you enough variety to stop you from feeling as though you are doing the same thing over and over again.  Homefront had no stand out game play, no boss battles and almost no variety.  Battlefield 3 tries to give a bit more variety but meets with limited success.  The jet sequence, for example.  When I first saw my character climbing into that jet, I thought, “Oh, shit.”  We’ve all played crappy jet-sims and dreamed how cool they would be if done right. While it isn’t amazing, it works well and blowing other jets out of the sky is fun.  The second half, though, I did have some issues with.  Black and white imagery?  Flashing strobe lights?  Modern Warfare, anyone?

Wow, This reminds me of a better game.

Then there was that shootout in the TV station.

Probably just a coincidence.

Then there was that time I was in the back of a car while people spoke in a language I couldn't understand while driving through a foreign city.

Oh, dear…

There’s a difference between wanting to best Modern Warfare and wanting to be Modern Warfare.  This wants to be the latter without putting in any of the creativity and variety that made those games so much fun. 

Battlefield 3 is also incredibly strict, not just in terms of what you do but also how you do it.  Early on in the game it had me sneak up on an enemy and quietly take him out.  Later on in the game I came to a near identical situation, but I ran into a problem.  Every time I quietly approached the guard, I dropped dead before reaching him.  It happened every single time and I was sure I was trapped in an instant kill glitch to the point that I reloaded an earlier save file. What I eventually realised was that the sudden deaths were happening because I was sneaking up on the enemy.  The game wanted me to run up to him and have a scripted fist fight.  Battlefield 3 is a game that offers the player zero flexibility in how they play the game. This is a game that threatens to kill you and return you to the last checkpoint if you stray to far away from the area you are meant to be in. This is a game that throws invisible walls at you to prevent you from moving into another area before you are meant to. 

None of this is helped by the fact that this game is very buggy.  One thing you can never call any of the Modern Warfare games is buggy.  Those game are solidly put together and I have never seen a single example of the rubbish I’ve seen in Battlefield 3.  Sometimes glitches in a game can be funny, you see something odd happening and you take a screen shot to share it with the rest of the internet.  Not in Battlefield 3 they’re not, they’re the kind of glitches that just mess up your game and piss you off.  One of the first glitches I noticed happening a lot was my gun disappearing leaving only a cross-hair.   This was more than annoying, it made the game unplayable as zooming in makes the cross hair disappear (it is meant to be replaced by the red dot).  The gun pops back eventually, but I found myself often returning to a check point with no gun and having to wait a good minute or so for it to return.  Non Playable Characters were at times invisible, and often scared the crap out of me because all I was aware of was a disembodied voice.  My first experience of this was with a friendly soldier, so I didn’t have anything to worry about in a combat sense.

I can hear him, but I can’t see him…

Oh, there he is.

The second time I was less lucky.  You can only take my word for it, but in the below screen shot, an invisible man knocked my character to the ground and began attacking.  Behind him are two other invisible enemies.

Direct front, my ass.

Both popped into sight a few seconds later, by which point they had already taken a few shots at me.

Even without these problems, combat is still a major pain in the arse. For one, the difficulty curve of this game is far to steep. The game goes from “fair, yet challenging,” to “bloody impossible” far too quickly and as much as I hated myself for it, I had to turn down the difficulty to get through it. One of my favourite things to do with a good game when I'm finished is to go back and play it again on the higher difficulty and challenge myself to beat it. Will I do this with Battlefield 3? Will I hell. Even without the insane difficulty, the game is just plain tedious to play. Bad guys hide in every hole, they can land bullets on you the second you come out from your cover and they have an annoying tenancy to shine bright lights in your eyes, effectively blinding you and leaving you completely vulnerable.

 Cheatin’ bitch.

And yes, I have heard that the game's multi-player is quite good, but I'm really not interested in playing online. I’m not interested in competition, or mindlessly shooting at people or building up kill streaks.  I’m not interested in having abuse hurled at me by a twelve year old who has just discovered the word “cunt”. I am one of those silly people who thinks that the most important part of a game should be the single player and that online should still be a bonus feature. Sadly the developers now tend to make a so-so single player campaign, because that's what actually sells, with most of the real focus on online gaming. I suspect that in ten or fifteen years time when we look back on this era of first person shooters we will realise what a hollow experience the vast majority of them were.

So, in conclusion: avoid. If you want a good, solid Modern Warfare like experience...go play Modern Warfare.