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Battlefield 3 review

Game: Battlefield 3
Platform: PC
Genre: First-Person Shooter (Contemporary)
Developer: DICE

Staff review by Tom Chick

November 06, 2011

I'm probably the last person to figure this out, but I think I've finally wrapped my head around what makes the Battlefield games work so well. It isn't the guns, or the tanks and helicopters, or the leveling up, or the graphics engine, or the classes, or even the players. Those all figure prominently, but not primarily. What you remember, what the game leaves in your head, where it gets its hooks into you, what impresses itself on you as surely as the story in BioShock, the landscape in Red Dead Redemption, or the animation in God of War are the places you fight.

In other words, the battlefields. You'd think at some time over the last 10 years of playing Battlefield games, I'd have appreciated the importance of the title.

Battlefield 3 asset

From its first visit to Wake Island in Battlefield 1942, this series has combined level design, graphics engine, and gameplay to bring places to life. The level design gives the places character, the graphics engine gives them spectacle, and the gameplay gives you a reason to be there. Battlefield 3 is a triumph in all three areas.

The Caspian border map, for instance. You cannot possibly play more than a couple of matches without falling in love with the hilltop for how it looms over the most of the map. Whether you're strafing it in a helicopter, lurking on its rocks under the trees, creeping up one of the two road approaches in a tank hoping no one's manning the TOW missile defenses, or scrambling up one of the steep footpaths, this is a hilltop you will come to know. It is a hill you will remember. Of all the inclines in all the games you've played, there hasn't been one that has mattered this much, this often, in this many different ways. Whether you're sniping down into the forest or dropping mortar shells on the guys hunkered down in the checkpoint, you know this hilltop is the place to be. It might survive the match unscathed, or it might be a mess of felled trees, razed buildings, and a collapsed radio tower. There is more character in one of Battlefield 3's capture points than most shooters have in an entire map list.

Traditionally, graphics engines have been a game of give-and-take. What was your priority? Did you want draw distance, frame rate, destructibility, or spectacle? In which case, I would have recommended Operation Flashpoint, Quake 2, Red Faction: Guerrilla, or Just Cause 2, respectively. Whatever your choice, you would have to make sacrifices, whether it was good animation, or a decent interface, or multiplayer. But if you've got the hardware, Battlefield 3 ticks all the boxes without compromise. More than any other graphics engine today, it's a complete package, featuring scale, scope, spectacle, on-foot detail and in-airplane elbow room, multiplayer, meaningful destruction, and absurdly good animation. Absurdly good. The animation is so good you probably won't even notice it. Of course the characters move this way because that's how real dudes move. What's the big deal? You almost have to go back to another game with the usual animation to appreciate what Battlefield 3 does.

Battlefield 3 asset

The new destructibility isn't on par with the free-form destruction in Red Faction: Guerrilla, but what is? It does just enough to really matter. For instance, you can't level a city block in Paris, but you can blow out walls and drop rubble onto dudes standing at the foot of a building. This is the closest a multiplayer shooter has come to matching what Relic's Company of Heroes did for real time strategy games.

You might not approve of the leveling system. It encourages players to stick with a single class, camp vehicles, and focus on getting kills with their weapon of choice. But you can't deny it's effective. Advancement is divided into separate tracks for your overall level, your choice of class, individual weapons, and types of vehicles. Each track comes with its own rewards, and each one advances simultaneously. Any given track can be a fairly drawn-out process, but there's always something either happening or on the verge of happening. Another thirty kills to unlock the fancy night-vision scope on your sniper rifle might seem an eternity away, but you're just about to get that nifty flying drone. In the end, Battlefield 3's rich-get-richer distribution is a necessary evil for the way it creates a sense of attachment to your role and your weapon.

Battlefield 3 has its share of peccadilloes, of varying degrees of importance to the overall package. The terrible single-player campaign is as bad as it is irrelevant. It's of no more consequence to the game than, say, the challenge mode in Batman: Arkham City. Electronic Arts has sadly given up on including bots the game, but at least they've added more ways to play meaningful games with fewer players. The rush mode and the squad matches, both from the Bad Company series, are a great alternative to Battlefield's traditional wide-open conquest modes. What's more, some of the maps are anything but wide open. There's nothing quite like a subway or a mountain tunnel to focus the flow of a conquest map.

Battlefield 3 asset

The front end for Battlefield games has always been an issue. A bloated, tedious, awkward issue. Electronic Arts' solution here is, uh, interesting. When you boot up Battlefield 3, you go straight to your web browser. This is your starting point no matter how you want to play, whether it's single-player, multiplayer, or the forgettable co-op challenges that you can grind to unlock a few additional doo-dads for multiplayer. It might seem like an odd starting point, but it makes sense. Where better to browse servers than a browser?

Because Battlefield 3 starts on a web page, it feels a lot less intrusive when EA uses it as the basis for their usual social networking silliness. I don't mind seeing a list of what my friends have unlocked, or when they've ranked up, or even having them post comments. It's one of the best water-cooler front ends built around a game this side of Starcraft II's battle.net. It's not nearly as thorough as what Activision intends for Modern Warfare 3, but it's much friendlier. It's more Facebook than analytical tool. This makes it all the more galling that I can't more easily connect and group with my friends thanks to an oddly inflexible squad system. Much like grouping in an MMO, the squad system can't just be a part of the gameplay. It also needs to be a part of the social element.

Battlefield 3 doesn't have the immediate run-and-gun appeal served so well by Modern Warfare 3. It never intended that. Instead, like the previous games, Battlefield 3 is about finding your place on the map, your place on your team, with your role, with your gun. Wars have always been about geography. Better than any other shooter, Battlefield 3 gets that.

More Reviews by Tom Chick
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