Battlefield 3 is nothing more than a two-year long beta for a future DICE project.
The single-player campaign is so bad it's hard to know where to begin. I guess we can knock incompetent A.I. off the list, but let's make it clear that it's on both sides of the aisle. At times you'll find yourself surrounded by soldiers both friendly and hostile basically engaged in the middle of the stupidest battle ever conceived, all to set the mood while you run down a trench. The pacing of the story is way off, too, so that you'll often wonder what's keeping your squad only to realize there is MORE dialogue to listen to passively. There are entire sections that seem to be designed specifically to frustrate the player, such as a great-looking sequence that gets you into the cockpit of a fighter jet AS A TARGET-MARKER. Each little section of the campaign is so scripted that trying out a new strategy or even fooling around at all usually results in a mysterious death for no stated reason. It's too bad, because some of the setpieces are challenging. The game also looks great, and some parts are very atmospheric, with lighting creating palpable tension. However these moments only punctuate an experience that overall is linear and frustrating.
The multiplayer is a joke. Sure, when the game runs well it can be fun, if your teammates and enemies are somewhat evenly matched. Most of the time, however, you can expect to enter matches that are more than half-way over. This means your teammates have already been losing, usually to a team that plays together. But all of this is academic, of course, because the simple fact is that this game is almost never running well. And this is after almost 20 patches. TWENTY PATCHES