EA/DICE's latest FPS romp is basically a less-fluid Call of Duty.
Let's start with the user experience. Pop the game disk in and... huh? You're immediately greeted with a 1.5GB hi-res texture pack download. Don't skip it, because if you don't install it, your game will look like it was made on an engine that can't even look it was made in 2004. It doesn't even look as good as Call of Duty 2, let alone live up to the marketing hype of the "Frostbite 2" engine.
So, now let's say you've downloaded that texture pack. I can finally play the game, right? WRONG. Next comes a 2GB+ multiplayer patch. This fixes many problems, but not all of them (most of the future patches should be server-side, though, not client-based: things like weapons-balancing, mainly).
After you've spent a few hours downloading stuff everything, you can finally play the game, right? Well, yes and no. You see, if you want to go the "Quick Match" route, then yes, you can get up and running pretty quickly. If you want to pick a server, it might take a while -- unless you keep refreshing the list (which sends you back to the top of the first page) -- then the only way to know whether a server has filled up in the 5 seconds it takes you to click "A" is to actually attempt to join it. If you want to play with friends, well, you might as well just take the game back to the store right now: trying to form a squad with your friends is bad enough, but actually joining the same game? Forget it. At least 3/5ths of the time, the game will try to put you and your three friends into a server with only one or two spaces, which means you get split into multiple different games. For something that is "best experienced with friends," well, DICE and EA don't make it particularly easy TO enjoy the experience with friends.
Actually, it's rather hard to enjoy the experience at all.
Once you finally get into a multiplayer game, the first thing you'll notice is, yeah, that "realism" stuff they touted is a load of crap. Somehow, magical bullets trace you over and around cover, killing you when you're out of the line of fire. (Hello, Call of Duty bullet physics!) Weapons that are nearly identical in real life (the F2000, FAMAS, M416, etc.) are all over the place: I understand the need to reward players who waste all their free time online, but giving them radically overpowered weapons is just plain stupid.
Multiplayer characters come in a variety of four flavos (Assault, Engineer, Support, and Recon), each of which has its own unique weapons and abilities. But there are some weapons that can be applied to all classes. And therein lies more poor design choices. Obviously, having your recon/sniper role running around with a shotgun like some moron jacked up on Ritalin makes sense -- at least in the Battlefield world it does.
Want to take down an enemy aircraft? Too bad. You have to play as an engineer for a certain amount of time (and get a certain number of kills) to unlock a slightly less crappy launcher. Yay, one that can lock onto air vehicles! Oops, everyone has IR flares by now, making your launcher about as effective as throwing small-to-medium sized rocks to take down an Aircraft Carrier.
But the other classes are better, right?
Nope. Apparently, personal defense weapons (PDWs) like the PP2000 and... well pretty much exclusively the PP2000 -- somehow trump full-sized assault rifles (like the M4 or the M16) at short-to-medium ranges. Shotguns (also available to all classes as a primary weapon) somehow shoot halfway across the map -- combine the USAS-12 with frag grenade rounds (WHAT!? Who's bright idea was that?) and you have a weapon that somehow manages to be even more irritating and cheap than Modern Warfare 2's ACR + Noob Tube combination.
I love the bullet trajectory, especially for long-range sniping, which requires you to aim your shots (as opposed to Call of Duty's "quick scoping"), but there have been times when I've shot someone dead on in the face and the game hasn't registered it. This may be attributed to lag, but it seems to most frequently occur in the sniper class.
Speaking of non-registering hits, there have been several occasions where I've unloaded a full magazine into an enemy only for them to turn around and OHK me with a suppressed pistol.
Well, surely -- surely -- the gameplay is better than Call of Duty, right?
Don't make me laugh. Your game mode options are Conquest (fancy talk for "Capture the Flag"), Team Deathmatch (up to 12 v. 12, on the rare occasion you find a nearly full server to join, or one that isn't completely lopsided, like 3 v. 9), Rush (also up to 12 v. 12, where one team must blow up some irritatingly poorly-placed MCOM stations, while the other defends them), and then 'squad' variations: Squad Deathmatch (four teams of 3 all playing against each other, which really isn't as fun as it should be) and Squad Rush (4 v. 4 version of regular Rush).
Now, you'd think that SQUAD games would promote people actually WORKING AS A SQUAD, but it doesn't. Everyone still tries to lone-wolf it.
It's not necessarily worse than Call of Duty, but it's certainly not much better.
And don't even get me started on the servers. When the game first came out, the Official DICE/EA servers crashed and absolutely failed. Now, although they're better, they are by no means perfect, since even the servers with the best ping times can get laggy. Maybe they've stretched their servers too thin, or they're just not powerful enough to run so many 'official' games at one time, who knows.
Wow, Mr. Chemical Reaper, you've really trashed the multiplayer experience. The story must be better, though?
Hell-to-the-no. The single player so linear, if you so much as step three inches out of the path the developers want you to take, blat-blat-blat, you're dead. I wish I was exaggerating.
The story itself is terrible. It's a contrived U.S. v. Russia story that features a U.S. Marine under investigation by the CIA for suspected involvement with a terrorist cell, which is told via flashback to key events in the Middle Ea---- HOLD UP A SECOND. That sounds suspiciously like Call of Duty: Black Ops, in which a U.S. Marine is under investigation by the CIA for suspected involvement with a terrorist cell, which is told via flashback to key events in undercover operations during the Cold War.
How original, DICE.
The campaign is truly awful.
The story and the dialogue seem to have been written by someone who has only the most basic understanding of the English language. The voice actors fail to inspire any sense of urgency or fright or, well, any emotion whatsoever: they fail at making you feel like you're actually in these situations.
Enemies will almost exclusively target you: and they do so with frightening accuracy. In one instance, the AI bugged out: my ally (who I was supposed to follow) ran through an entire room full of Russians -- not a single one of them cared: instead, they all continued to focus their fire on me.
In another instance, on a level called "Thunder Run," I had positioned my tank behind an ally's tank to let him take fire (all allies are invincible, unless they're scripted to be taken down) while my tank repaired itself. Well, somehow, the enemy T72 tank managed to fire a shell that went through the sand dune in front of my tank AND THEN THROUGH THE TANK IN FRONT OF ME, hitting ME and blowing up my tank.
It's honestly like nobody at DICE even played the campaign before they sent it out.
Enemies will hit you with their magical heat-seeking, scenery-dodging, night-vision bullet hoses (I don't think the Russian AI even has to reload in this game!). You can be sneaking up the side of the map (at the start of "Between a Rock and a Hard Place"), and somehow their goddamn spider senses go off and they all IMMEDIATELY know to redirect their fire to you. Y'know, because they don't need to worry about the platoon of American soldiers firing on them from down the road, right?
No, seriously, they don't: your allies' bullets will do NOTHING against the enemies. Which kind of begs the question, "why even bother with allies in the first place?" They won't take enemy fire for you (because the enemies won't target them), they barely hit the enemies, and even when they do, their bullets are practically useless: taking at least three times the number of bullets to kill an enemy than it would take you.
Never before, on a console, have I seen a game that managed to have the best and worst graphics of the year within a SINGLE frame. The soldiers are all so well modeled: even their boots are beautifully rendered with hi-res graphics. Which makes it all the more disappointing when you're prone and you see their hi-res boots against literally the worst ground textures of this console cycle.
DICE couldn't even be bothered to spell-check the subtitles. In one instance, the subtitles reference an "enemy unti" (thankfully, the voice actor read it as "enemy unit"). And in almost every single instance, DICE uses a colon (":") in place of an apostrophe when referencing multiple somethings using an abbreviation: e.g. "LAV's" (which is still grammatically incorrect: it should be "LAVs") is written in the subtitles as "LAV:s").
Overall, the campaign is one of the worst experiences I have ever had to endure in a game.
Okay, now you're also a music fan, right? How's the soundtrack?
The soundtrack is great!..... if you enjoy the grating sound of repetitious late-80s EuroPop synths and low-end popping sound effects. If, like me, you enjoyed the orchestral soundtracks of classic games like Call of Duty 2, Battlefield 1942/1943, or Halo, et al., then at best the soundtrack will just blend in with the rest of the sounds, and you'll be able to ignore it, or at worst the soundtrack will just get on your nerves. Even if you're a fan of electronic music, it's nothing to write home about: there are really only two or three half-decent tracks that have a good, driving beat; the rest is just unimaginative and self-derivative.
So, there you have it, folks. Battlefield 3 is simply another bland, sub-par first person shooter with an awful story, twitch-finger trigger-play, and multiplayer that's so broken you could cut butter.
(I'm the author of this review; it was originally posted on GameFAQs: 01/27/12, and updated 02/13/12.)