Battlefield 3 - Singleplayer

Review from Sarge - Saturday, 05 November 2011 @ 8:04pm

It's a pretty well-known fact that if you're a FPS fan, you've no doubt played a Battlefield game. If it wasn't Battlefield 2 from 6 years ago, then it was definitely one of the games that they've done in the meantime, including the almost accidentally successfully Bad Company 2. So it's fair to say that when you slap the word "Battlefield" onto your game title, there's going to a fair amount of pressure to release a quality product.

Detailed environments are all part of the single player experience

For those that loved Bad Company 2, you may be a little put-off at first. For the single-player campaign, gone are the rag-tag bunch of soldiers from Bad Company that you're used to slinging guns with, and replaced is an quite serious and dramatic campaign plot. While it's not terrible, I hate to admit that for the majority of the storyline, it's quite boring. There are characters that you're quickly expected to care about, with very little explanation of who they are. The plot is also a little hard to follow until around 3/4 of the way through. Without giving too much away, the plot 'twist' is really good, but it's done way too late. If it was a movie, then it would've been perfect timing, but it's not, so neither is the plot. I hate to mention Call Of Duty, but the basic plot devices is almost identical to Black Ops, which is so annoyingly destracting.

Planes - you fly em, well sometimes..

The missions themselves are relatively fun, but a lot of the best bits are either heavily scripted or contain awful quick-time events. Even on the very first mission, shooting bad guys on a moving subway train, you fight off a terrorist and push him out of a window. The sequence itself is amazing to watch, but done by press just a couple of buttons, which is less than amazing. As the plot unfolds, you go through various missions that tend to feel like they're just ticking boxes. You, as the main character Sgt Blackburn, explains what happens in order to track down nukes, yet some of story is quite disjointed, and for the majority, it's hard to really understand what one mission has to do with another.

But, despite all the bad things I've mentioned, there's a lot of good things about it. There's quite a lot of tense moments thought. I think I despairingly uttered the words "holy fuck" at least a few times, totally unsure how I was going to get through a particular level, or when I could tell what I was about to do was going to unleash hell, but I did it anyway. Despite the short campaign and the things I've mentioned above, I did enjoy the gameplay itself.

However, the one thing I've been holding back on, that I can't keep to myself for any longer: this game is quite frankly one of the best looking games I've ever played. This game is so sexy, I want to take it out for a nice dinner, go walking along the beach holding it's hand, whisper sweet nothing in it's ear, then take it back to my place for a night of hot fiery passion and a safe-word that we agree previously have agreed on. The way that you are seamlessly thrown from scenario to scenario with barely a flutter of awkward adjustment. The lighting effects are quite frankly, the best lighting effects I've ever seen. There were quite a number of times that I was killed because I decided to take a moment to stop and look around at my environment - and trust me, it's worth dying a few times. There's been nothing that hasn't been given oodles of loving attention from DICE, and it truly shows.

It is important to note the witches hat - safety first people!

But despite the good and the bad, let's face it: if you love playing Battlefield, you haven't come here for the single-player campaign. Including our good friend Barry, who can take you all the way through Multiplayer and out the other side here

Pros

Great visuals
Enjoyable gameplay

Cons

Missions contain multiple QTE's
Short campaign
Disjointed missions make it hard to understand whats going on