Written by: Ian

 

 

 

Head-to-head, mano-a-mano, Battlefield and COD have squared up for a fight this Christmas. EA have clearly put everything into this release, with a huge marketing campaign, and shipping 5 million copies to retailers- but can the normally excellent BF series compete at the highest level against MW3?

 

 

"Battlefield 3" features a story ripped straight from the annals of COD. There’s missing nukes, Russians and Americans on the verge of war, and all kinds of fancy-pants military words and technology involved. Battlefield also has you taking on the roles of multiple soldiers, including a tank pilot, and jet-fighter gunner, as well as an infantryman. Unfortunately, the flashback storytelling I found to be rather confusing, and I struggled to work out just who I was playing as, or what their role was for much of the game, despite playing through the campaign in 2 sittings.

 

 

Battlefield games have long suffered from lacklustre single player experiences, and you can see that DICE have really tried to up the ante with their campaign here. Unfortunately, whilst it has some incredible moments, it reeks for the most part of a COD rip-off.

 

 

There are some real highlights though- where the game shines is where it does the stuff that COD cannot/ does not do- the large battlefields, the vehicle sections, and the sweeping vistas. The scripted moments rarely hit the highs or innovation that COD brings to the FPS market really.

 

The other annoyance is the prevalence of Quick Time Events (QTE’s). Some of these are fine- but others are really lame, and sometimes the buttons you press seem to have little relevance to the timing of what happens. One only requires you to press one button before a huge scene is acted out- why bother? Either utilise QTEs properly, or ignore them and keep these events as static cut-scenes.

 

 

The campaign is a decent (read- average) length, but once you’ve racked up the achievements, there’s little point to going back through it, but let’s face it- for the majority of people, the campaign was probably not the reason why you bought the game in the first place!? If you can get through the complicated storytelling, this is probably the most fun and explosive BF single player yet, but it has a long way to go to match the constant intensity of the MW series yet.