Battlefield 3
Review
The redundancy of single-player
by Quinn Levandoski
reviewed on PC
There's no 'I' in 'Team'
First of all, if you don’t already know, the Battlefield franchise has never been a big fan of team deathmatch or free-for-all. TDM and Squad TDM (pitting four small teams against each other on a smaller map) are in the game, but they take out a lot of what makes the game’s multiplayer great. What exactly is it that makes multiplayer here so great? Well, a whole lot actually, the first of which is scale. Battlefield 3’s maps are huge. I don’t mean like stick two Call of Duty maps together huge, I mean “so big you can’t even see the whole map from up high in a jet” huge. The two main multiplayer game modes present, 'Conquest' and 'Rush', both use these large maps to great effect. 'Conquest' is the original Battlefield game mode. In this mode, players battle for control of certain command posts (three on consoles, or five on the PC). The command post serves as spawn points for players and vehicles, and controlling all of them starts bleeding re-spawns from your opponent. 'Rush' puts one team on offense and one on defense. The defenders try to attack two posts, after which a new area of the map opens up with two new posts. They must go through three or four sets of posts to win. Both of these modes are not only grand in scale in terms of physical size, but also in terms of how they translate player importance and tides of battle. In team deathmatch (in Battlefield as well as other games) it never really seems like you’re going anywhere. You may get a seven or eight kill streak, but when it’s over, your team isn’t really in any different a position than they were before, save for a number on a scoreboard. 'Rush' and 'Conquest' aren’t like this. If you do something here, it can impact the entire dynamic of the battlefield. One sniper bullet may take out a defender which may not seem like much, but this defender could have been the last man defending a post, which allows your team to take it and control an Abrams tank, which forces your opponents to switch out their snipers for RPGs, which makes your foot soldiers more capable, etc... This may seem a bit far-fetched, but I’ve had similar situations happen almost every game. Every single person plays an incredibly important role, and every action has ripples that can change the entire game. I can’t explain how awesome that feels. In a world where lone-wolves often dominate online multiplayer, the sense of community and interconnectivity in every single game is unlike anything else. It actually makes you work towards objectives instead of doctoring your kill/death ratio.
On another note, vehicles work excellently in Battlefield 3. I know fans of the franchise already know how important the various vehicles have been in every Battlefield game, but potential newcomers or skeptics may not quite understand. It’s reasonable to assume that having most maps packed with vehicles like tanks, jets, amphibious assault vehicles, attack helicopters, and more might take the focus away from actual infantry combat and make it impossible to succeed without them. This isn’t the case at all. First of all some of the vehicles (mainly choppers and jets) are quite difficult to control. They aren’t impossible to the point of being useless, but they’re hard enough that you have to constantly be focused just as much on control as shooting. This is great, because it means that it’s not easy to get a huge kill count from the air. Success in vehicles requires just as much skill as anywhere else. Secondly, there is always a counter for everything, which means that controlling one vehicle doesn’t equal success. Tanks are great, but rocket launcher can do work on them pretty quick. Planes and choppers can take out infantry, but are vulnerable to anti-aircraft guns. Anti-aircraft guns can shred planes and choppers, but a tank can blow them up easy. It’s this system of checks and balances that keeps everything fair and fun.
Newbies Beware
On a final note about mutiplayer, if you’re a newcomer to the franchise who wants to try it out, you need to give it a few days. It plays very different than Call of Duty or Medal of Honor, so it may take you a few days of quick deaths and confusion to get on the right track. You’ll need to get used to guns that kick when you hold the trigger down. You’ll need to practice sniping with bullets that drop realistically over far distances. You’ll need to work on focusing on team play instead of kill streaks. If you do give it the time it deserves, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. If I was scoring Battlefield 3 on multiplayer alone, I would give it a 10 without any hesitation.
So now comes the tricky part; giving the game a score. I really did think long and hard about this. There are a few ways that I could logically have gone about it. I could have weighted the campaign and multiplayer equally since they’re both present in the game, I could have completely discounted the campaign since Battlefield is traditionally played for its multiplayer, or I could find a medium somewhere in the middle. I decided that in my personal opinion, giving the campaign as much weight as the multiplayer isn’t fair. I know that it’s a part of the game and deserves to count, but I don’t believe that it was intended to be more than a small diversion for people who would complain about paying full price for a multiplayer-only game. I know that some people out there are going to disagree with that choice and I know that some people out there are going to buy this game for the single player more than multiplayer, which is why I’ll repeat that you really need to trust my words over my score and decide what about this game is important to you personally. If you want a strong single-player experience, there are much better titles out there for you and you should probably stay clear of Battlefield 3. If you just want multiplayer than this might be your game of the year.
P.S. To be clear, most the score categories for the game such as sound and graphics apply equally to both sides of the coin, but gameplay and replay are vastly different so I had no choice but to take the average. So, for each one add bit for multiplayer, and take a bit away for campaign.
9.0
fun score
Pros
Great atmospheric graphics and unmatched multiplayer.
Cons
Uninspired campaign which hurts the overall package.
