This game just fails to impress me
User Rating: 7 | Battlefield 3 (Limited Edition) X360
My first Battlefield game was BC2 and it was great and I played it a ton and bought all of the map packs and such. As soon as I saw trailers for this game I was excited because it meant I could enjoy another Battlefield. I preordered it because Newegg had a sale on it ($12 off preorder). First thing my brother and I played was the campaign. Gun play was great but the story just wasn't very good and was an obvious rip off of other game series. One thing I didn't like about the gun play was the fact that unlike the Call of Duty series or BC2, you could not really shoot through objects to kill someone. I thought that was pretty stupid. The graphics are a mixed bag. Lighting is some of the best I have seen on the 360 and the edges on objects look smooth. Unfortunately, some textures look horrendous, they pop in and out, and sometimes the colors do not seem natural. If I were to compare the graphics of this to that of Far Cry 2, FC2 has better textures and more natural colors while BF3 has better lighting and general smoothness of shapes. On to physics, I noticed while watching my brother play co-op that the physics were terrible in some sections while in the helicopter mission. Otherwise in single player and co-op the physics are fine. The biggest part of most FPS today is the multiplayer. I was not impressed at all with this. The maps look much better than the maps on BC2 yet I don't think they really work. Next problem is that they start you out with literally nothing. The starting guns are laughable and this is a problem because it takes forever to unlock new weapons and there is no seperation between low and high level players (When I first started playing the multiplayer within a week of the game coming out there were already people that were extremely high levels, showing me that the servers were weakly protected and people hacked them). Also annoyingly you have to unlock attachments on each gun instead of it unlocking across the board like on BC2. This would not be a annoyance if the attachments didn't take forever to unlock. Next problem is the Recon Class; They made it extremely difficult to get kills with the first few sniper rifles that you get, mainly by making all shots except headshots be only enough to hurt the person not kill (very different than BC2). My next issues deal with anything that flies: the helicopters were made more difficult to control than it was in BC2 and unlocks are difficult and just plain dumb. What does not make sense is how difficult it is to get kills with the planes while the planes can be shot down extremely quickly and easily. First off it doesn't make sense that a plane that costs $20 million in real life goes up into the sky with no flares or means to defend itself. This game wanted to be more realistic but failed there. Next thing that is extremely annoying is how difficult it is to actually kill someone while you are in the plane (because of this I still have not been able to level up the plane to lvl 2 after 30 or so rounds dedicated to the plane). You have to have a perfect shot onto your opponent and it takes a good number of rounds to shoot them down. If an opponent crashes into you it says you committed suicide (and they committed suicide). Next thing is that the planes are extremely glitchy in that I have been flying around and the plane does not respond to movement at random times (not stalling just you can't accelerate/decelerate, pitch, roll, or bank), thankfully most of the time it does not make you crash but sometimes it does. Also a few times I have been just flying around, no lock on the plane, nobody behind me shooting at me, not outside of the map, then I just randomly die and it says "bad luck". The next problem I encounter with the game is that the spawn system sometimes does not work and say I want to spawn in a plane and it either spawns me on top of the plane and someone is in it or somewhere else entirely on the map. Another problem I have noticed is this game lags much much more than BC2 did. A glaring issue shared between this game and BC2 is the lack of a game lobby and/or choice to vote for the next map. This is bad because sometimes you want to leave the server after the end of the round and the only way to do that is to actually to go back to Xbox dashboard. Overall I really don't think this game is an improvement over BC2 because the only thing that is better is graphics and almost everything else really isn't better and this game is difficult and not all that fun.
