Battlefield 3 is a follow up to the stellar Battlefield 2 that was released on 2005. Does the game live up to the original? I would say yes. The multiplayer offers up to 64 players on the PC which is great and has varied wide open multiplayer maps with great varieties. You could use tanks, air crafts, ground vehicles you name it. In terms of single player, it is descent but nothing to right home about compared to other single player games. Then again Battlefield games are not know for their single player. The single player has multiple different missions and to DICE's credit they included varieties including using tanks and riding on a fighter jet to take out targets. It has in between cut scenes throughout the game giving, watching a movie type of feel to it. It does have a feel of some Hollywood block buster end of the world action movies. I played through it to the end just to see the ending.
Graphically, this game raised the bar. From the beginning where you run through a Middle eastern street that was shown in the initial trailers the game gave off a wow feeling when initially shown. The Frostbite 2 engine is truly a sight to behold when it was released. DICE did an excellent job with the engine and raising the graphical bar. Dare I say they took the crown from Crytek with respect to the best graphics from 2011 as Crysis 2 was launched the same year but did not have the same graphical fidelity as Battlefield 3 on the PC.
Now, comes the bad part. The game has many bugs and stability issues. I played this on Windows 10 with the latest nVidia drivers on my GTX 970M and I had constant crashes maybe up to 3 dozen times. It may be with the nVidia drivers but I didn't experience such things in other games. Multiplayer seems to also have issues as others have stated. So be wary of this when buying this game. It may not be worth the frustration of paying full price for the game.
Overall, a great game and a great follow up to Battlefield 2 that raised the graphical bar on the PC with the newer Frostbite 2 engine.