Mike Nomad
11-04-2011, 08:17 AM
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Battlefield 3 Review
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Edge Staff - October 28, 2011
Though stunning to behold, DICE's gambit for military shooter ascendancy is limited by imitation.
Games: Battlefield 3
Company: DICE EA
Genre: Shooter
Format: PlayStation 3Xbox 360PC
Be careful what you wish for. Though rightly renowned as the go-to franchise for grandiose online carnage, Battlefield’s masters have long had lusty eyes for Call Of Duty’s rigidly scripted, gung-ho military fantasy – or at least the money it makes.
With Battlefield 3, which remains a deliriously brilliant multiplayer experience, DICE has conspicuously touted a singleplayer campaign that is every bit the cinematic spectacle fans of the quasi-interactive man-clicking genre might want, replete with a histrionic, globe-trotting plot about stolen nukes and implausible geopolitical consequences. EA has got what it wanted, certainly, but is that what Battlefield 3 deserves?
Flashbacks rattle you between roles as a disgraced US marine, a tank driver, an aircraft gunner and a Spetsnaz operative, all embroiled in a threadbare bit of hokum that sees you murder your way through sections of Tehran, Paris and New York. There can be no argument over the scene-setting potency of DICE’s efforts in technology and visual design. Battlefield 3 frequently leaves players slack-jawed with amazement at its compositions, from the ruined Iranian shopping mall, moonlight and rain cascading through its punctured roof on to tiers of collapsed walkways, to the pristine angles of a modernist mansion complex, perched upon a dusky cliff overlooking the Caspian Sea.
http://media.next-gen.biz/files/EDG235.p_bf3.s738869925914060334440.jpg
Elsewhere, reflections flare and ripple as wind sheers across the deck of an aircraft carrier, light refracting to brightly pepper your visor. Even when unhelmeted, light fragments and bleeds as though you had fitted a smeary Perspex sheet to your face – an odd contrivance that nonetheless creates dazzling, fluid images, the superimposition of colour and texture drawing together the disparate geometries beneath. No war has ever been this beautiful. It even looks the business on the creaky old consoles; on a half-decent PC, it transcends.
But wonderment is not the only reason the player might be left slack-jawed. As kinetic as it all feels, the strict stage-management of Battlefield 3’s solo campaign offers so very little room for the player to express independence that its firefights sometimes struggle to keep your attention, despite the superb orchestration of screen-rattling rumbles, whistling bullets and ear-popping explosions. Interaction is largely a trivial adjunct to the game’s showreel of pretty flashing lights and sounds, and anything outside its lexicon of bullets is dealt with via a context-sensitive action. Even the decision to equip a weapon you are apparently already carrying is sometimes taken out of your hands. Want to climb a ladder? Go through a door? Walk forward? Not until you are given orders, soldier. So rigid is the scripting that allies can fatally pin you into cover while attempting to follow their programming.
This isn’t just an inflexible framework: the gunfights themselves exist in such strictly bounded arenas, and against such suicidal AI, that the player’s tactical input is often pared down to a form of whack-a-mole. The vicious punch of each gun is a consolation, but it’s nonetheless a far cry from the freewheeling dynamism of multiplayer. While there are exceptions – a push across a heavily occupied valley offers a modest front line to explore – the accumulation of pop-up enemy-clicking and canned animations occasionally leaves you wondering why the game wants you there at all.
The aesthetics carry it, but only just. An abrupt digression into on-rails jet combat leaves you with precious little to do, but it is a searing visual experience: such is DICE’s expertise in conveying the material world through keyboard and pad that takeoff had us rolling away from the screen with the G-force. Even the game’s most narrowly defined corridor conflicts are densely, artfully drawn, and whether you’re fighting a running battle through the streets of Paris or deflecting an ambush in sun-dappled woodlands, the environments express much larger worlds.
The same can’t really be said for the game’s perfunctory plot. DICE evidently has all the pieces in place to deliver a rich and meaningful narrative experience, but it goes to waste when used only to prop up improbable scenarios for gunfights. With Russians, Americans and Iranians all the hapless stooges of some inexplicably psychotic provocateur, the game does at least manage to skirt some of the dehumanising xenophobia innate to culling scores of mindless foreign wretches. The tone is sober too, without the eager sadism of Black Ops, and some of the incidental dialogue is delivered with an underplayed authenticity. DICE has assembled acting talent that lend both their faces and voices to the roles, and with the right opportunity might have been more endearing for it.
Meanwhile, a meaty and varied two-man co-op campaign shares many of the singleplayer’s foibles, and some of its locations too. But while you can saunter through solo on normal difficulty, DICE has chosen to make co-op brutally difficult even on its easiest setting. The enemy numbers pose a substantial challenge by themselves, at least until you clock their spawn points on successive replays, but we suspect the major stumbling block will be that progress depends on completing the second mission, in which one of you is asked to fly a helicopter. You don’t get to choose which of you plays pilot and who mans the guns, and nor can you swap. As series veterans will know, only a small percentage of Battlefield players are able to take off without ploughing into a mountainside, such are the peculiar, capricious and entirely untaught controls. Despite all this, Battlefield 3 remains as magnificent a multiplayer game as it ever has been, generous in its variety of tactics, inspiring in its scale and riotous in the collision of vehicles, foot soldiers and aircraft. Even on console, where numbers are shaved from 64 to 24 and the environments trimmed to match, the conflicts feel suitably epic: jeeps careen over hills, rattling off rounds into the sky; tanks churn through streets, punching holes in buildings with the hope of landing a shell in their opponent’s tracks; soldiers duck through the chaos, exchanging fire as helicopters prowl above.
As has always been the rule, dying soldiers get recycled in waves of spawns, depleting their team’s tickets until one side runs dry. The series-defining Conquest gametype sees players battle for dominance over widely dispersed objectives, the team with fewer flags bleeding tickets faster, while Rush and the smaller-scale Squad Rush see one team defend a linear chain of checkpoints as the other barrels its way through. Though these core modes will be familiar to players of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, there is clear advancement, not least in density of environments. Even a setting of extravagant size, such as one horizon-stretching expanse of desert, is lavishly detailed, with players able to turn dizzying scale into tighter conflicts within the intricate outbuildings and refineries.
Players can opt for the sort of game they wish to play, and find some corner of the maelstrom which supports it. This has always been one of Battlefield’s strengths, particularly in Conquest, but never has it been so pronounced. The return of jets adds another tier of play, their aerial duelling almost entirely removed from the ground action. DICE’s subtle tweaking of the classes allows for more fluid roles, and for each there is a bewildering number of unlockables, allowing you to fine-tune your death-dealing with selected armaments and accessories. The addition of vision-disrupting lasers, blinding flashlights and dizzying suppression fire further fills out the repertoire of tactics.
Where this devotion to player choice comes a little unstuck is when it echoes COD’s bias towards ground battles. The chokepoints of several Rush maps threaten to stultify, and since the environmental destruction now only occasionally proffers alternate routes, digging out entrenched defenders can be gruelling. The dense Grand Bazaar and Seine Crossing, meanwhile, lend themselves well to the sort of spine-exploding instant death which punctuates rounds in Modern Warfare, as canny players will always be able to use the mesh of alleys to locate vulnerable backs. Separate deathmatch modes also cater to such tastes, and though Battlefield 3 equips itself very well as a twitch shooter and the diversity is welcome enough, it’s clear that the game’s excellence – indeed, its supremacy – lies in the variety of expression available in its grander conflicts.
This cuts to the centre of our dissatisfaction with Battlefield 3’s singleplayer, too. As audiovisually accomplished as any game has been, at least on PC, its deference to prescribed spectacle is an assiduous realisation of blockbuster gaming tastes, with an increasing reliance on ‘video’ rather than ‘game’. EA wants Battlefield 3 to be all things to all people, and it’s right in thinking that the addition of a singleplayer duck shoot doesn’t detract from its other substantial offerings. But in this act of imitation, and limitation, it disregards the choice and tactical empowerment which make the series near-peerless and preciously idiosyncratic in multiplayer.
PC and PS3 versions tested.
SOURCE (http://www.next-gen.biz/reviews/battlefield-3-review)
Battlefield 3 Review
http://media.next-gen.biz/files/imagecache/article/articles/reviews/battlefield_3_1.jpg
Edge Staff - October 28, 2011
Though stunning to behold, DICE's gambit for military shooter ascendancy is limited by imitation.
Games: Battlefield 3
Company: DICE EA
Genre: Shooter
Format: PlayStation 3Xbox 360PC
Be careful what you wish for. Though rightly renowned as the go-to franchise for grandiose online carnage, Battlefield’s masters have long had lusty eyes for Call Of Duty’s rigidly scripted, gung-ho military fantasy – or at least the money it makes.
With Battlefield 3, which remains a deliriously brilliant multiplayer experience, DICE has conspicuously touted a singleplayer campaign that is every bit the cinematic spectacle fans of the quasi-interactive man-clicking genre might want, replete with a histrionic, globe-trotting plot about stolen nukes and implausible geopolitical consequences. EA has got what it wanted, certainly, but is that what Battlefield 3 deserves?
Flashbacks rattle you between roles as a disgraced US marine, a tank driver, an aircraft gunner and a Spetsnaz operative, all embroiled in a threadbare bit of hokum that sees you murder your way through sections of Tehran, Paris and New York. There can be no argument over the scene-setting potency of DICE’s efforts in technology and visual design. Battlefield 3 frequently leaves players slack-jawed with amazement at its compositions, from the ruined Iranian shopping mall, moonlight and rain cascading through its punctured roof on to tiers of collapsed walkways, to the pristine angles of a modernist mansion complex, perched upon a dusky cliff overlooking the Caspian Sea.
http://media.next-gen.biz/files/EDG235.p_bf3.s738869925914060334440.jpg
Elsewhere, reflections flare and ripple as wind sheers across the deck of an aircraft carrier, light refracting to brightly pepper your visor. Even when unhelmeted, light fragments and bleeds as though you had fitted a smeary Perspex sheet to your face – an odd contrivance that nonetheless creates dazzling, fluid images, the superimposition of colour and texture drawing together the disparate geometries beneath. No war has ever been this beautiful. It even looks the business on the creaky old consoles; on a half-decent PC, it transcends.
But wonderment is not the only reason the player might be left slack-jawed. As kinetic as it all feels, the strict stage-management of Battlefield 3’s solo campaign offers so very little room for the player to express independence that its firefights sometimes struggle to keep your attention, despite the superb orchestration of screen-rattling rumbles, whistling bullets and ear-popping explosions. Interaction is largely a trivial adjunct to the game’s showreel of pretty flashing lights and sounds, and anything outside its lexicon of bullets is dealt with via a context-sensitive action. Even the decision to equip a weapon you are apparently already carrying is sometimes taken out of your hands. Want to climb a ladder? Go through a door? Walk forward? Not until you are given orders, soldier. So rigid is the scripting that allies can fatally pin you into cover while attempting to follow their programming.
This isn’t just an inflexible framework: the gunfights themselves exist in such strictly bounded arenas, and against such suicidal AI, that the player’s tactical input is often pared down to a form of whack-a-mole. The vicious punch of each gun is a consolation, but it’s nonetheless a far cry from the freewheeling dynamism of multiplayer. While there are exceptions – a push across a heavily occupied valley offers a modest front line to explore – the accumulation of pop-up enemy-clicking and canned animations occasionally leaves you wondering why the game wants you there at all.
The aesthetics carry it, but only just. An abrupt digression into on-rails jet combat leaves you with precious little to do, but it is a searing visual experience: such is DICE’s expertise in conveying the material world through keyboard and pad that takeoff had us rolling away from the screen with the G-force. Even the game’s most narrowly defined corridor conflicts are densely, artfully drawn, and whether you’re fighting a running battle through the streets of Paris or deflecting an ambush in sun-dappled woodlands, the environments express much larger worlds.
The same can’t really be said for the game’s perfunctory plot. DICE evidently has all the pieces in place to deliver a rich and meaningful narrative experience, but it goes to waste when used only to prop up improbable scenarios for gunfights. With Russians, Americans and Iranians all the hapless stooges of some inexplicably psychotic provocateur, the game does at least manage to skirt some of the dehumanising xenophobia innate to culling scores of mindless foreign wretches. The tone is sober too, without the eager sadism of Black Ops, and some of the incidental dialogue is delivered with an underplayed authenticity. DICE has assembled acting talent that lend both their faces and voices to the roles, and with the right opportunity might have been more endearing for it.
Meanwhile, a meaty and varied two-man co-op campaign shares many of the singleplayer’s foibles, and some of its locations too. But while you can saunter through solo on normal difficulty, DICE has chosen to make co-op brutally difficult even on its easiest setting. The enemy numbers pose a substantial challenge by themselves, at least until you clock their spawn points on successive replays, but we suspect the major stumbling block will be that progress depends on completing the second mission, in which one of you is asked to fly a helicopter. You don’t get to choose which of you plays pilot and who mans the guns, and nor can you swap. As series veterans will know, only a small percentage of Battlefield players are able to take off without ploughing into a mountainside, such are the peculiar, capricious and entirely untaught controls. Despite all this, Battlefield 3 remains as magnificent a multiplayer game as it ever has been, generous in its variety of tactics, inspiring in its scale and riotous in the collision of vehicles, foot soldiers and aircraft. Even on console, where numbers are shaved from 64 to 24 and the environments trimmed to match, the conflicts feel suitably epic: jeeps careen over hills, rattling off rounds into the sky; tanks churn through streets, punching holes in buildings with the hope of landing a shell in their opponent’s tracks; soldiers duck through the chaos, exchanging fire as helicopters prowl above.
As has always been the rule, dying soldiers get recycled in waves of spawns, depleting their team’s tickets until one side runs dry. The series-defining Conquest gametype sees players battle for dominance over widely dispersed objectives, the team with fewer flags bleeding tickets faster, while Rush and the smaller-scale Squad Rush see one team defend a linear chain of checkpoints as the other barrels its way through. Though these core modes will be familiar to players of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, there is clear advancement, not least in density of environments. Even a setting of extravagant size, such as one horizon-stretching expanse of desert, is lavishly detailed, with players able to turn dizzying scale into tighter conflicts within the intricate outbuildings and refineries.
Players can opt for the sort of game they wish to play, and find some corner of the maelstrom which supports it. This has always been one of Battlefield’s strengths, particularly in Conquest, but never has it been so pronounced. The return of jets adds another tier of play, their aerial duelling almost entirely removed from the ground action. DICE’s subtle tweaking of the classes allows for more fluid roles, and for each there is a bewildering number of unlockables, allowing you to fine-tune your death-dealing with selected armaments and accessories. The addition of vision-disrupting lasers, blinding flashlights and dizzying suppression fire further fills out the repertoire of tactics.
Where this devotion to player choice comes a little unstuck is when it echoes COD’s bias towards ground battles. The chokepoints of several Rush maps threaten to stultify, and since the environmental destruction now only occasionally proffers alternate routes, digging out entrenched defenders can be gruelling. The dense Grand Bazaar and Seine Crossing, meanwhile, lend themselves well to the sort of spine-exploding instant death which punctuates rounds in Modern Warfare, as canny players will always be able to use the mesh of alleys to locate vulnerable backs. Separate deathmatch modes also cater to such tastes, and though Battlefield 3 equips itself very well as a twitch shooter and the diversity is welcome enough, it’s clear that the game’s excellence – indeed, its supremacy – lies in the variety of expression available in its grander conflicts.
This cuts to the centre of our dissatisfaction with Battlefield 3’s singleplayer, too. As audiovisually accomplished as any game has been, at least on PC, its deference to prescribed spectacle is an assiduous realisation of blockbuster gaming tastes, with an increasing reliance on ‘video’ rather than ‘game’. EA wants Battlefield 3 to be all things to all people, and it’s right in thinking that the addition of a singleplayer duck shoot doesn’t detract from its other substantial offerings. But in this act of imitation, and limitation, it disregards the choice and tactical empowerment which make the series near-peerless and preciously idiosyncratic in multiplayer.
PC and PS3 versions tested.
SOURCE (http://www.next-gen.biz/reviews/battlefield-3-review)