Battlefield 3 Review (X360)

Battlefield 3 is a real Jekyll and Hyde-type of game. On one side you have a completely derivative and disappointing solo campaign. On the other, you have a fantastically deep and satisfying multiplayer. It is clear that most of the care and attention went into the multiplayer, and we're fine with that, but when the competition's offerings are more well rounded, it is hard to recommend Battlefield 3 on quite the same level. If your focus is on multiplayer, Battlefield 3 is among the absolute best and worth buying. If your focus is mainly on the campaign, move along. It is as simple as that.Single-Player Campaign

It is clear the campaign isn't the main attraction here since the single-player is actually on disc 2 and the multiplayer is on disc 1. If that doesn't tell you what is more important, I don't know what could make it more obvious. At any rate, there is a full story driven campaign here similar to the Bad Company games (minus the fun banter among the squad, BF3 is super serious) rather than the bot-driven training modes in the other Battlefield games.

The campaign itself is completely derivative, though. It is like it takes the best parts of the last few Call of Duty games and mashes them all together. It is hard not to get a sense of serious deja-vu when the first mission ends with a gun pointed at your head (a COD trademark) and the meat of the story is told through flashbacks while the main character is being interrogated (hello Black Ops). The six-hour campaign features missions you'd expect - a sniper mission, lots of turret sections, lots of urban combat, even a mark targets on the ground from a plane mission we've seen somewhere else before.

The fact that we've seen a lot of this before isn't necessarily the problem, though. I honestly like the campaigns in these types of games, and there is only so much you can do before it stops being realistic, so seeing similar missions between games isn't that big of a deal. The problem with Battlefield 3's campaign is the way it is presented. It is more like a guided tour of modern combat where your indestructible squad mates take you by the hand and lead you through the fights than you actually really having the freedom to do anything. You just sort of follow your squad around, or follow mission markers (and you don't want to break from the mission path, the game throws up a "leaving the battle area" warning if you do even if a different path might lead to a better flanking position or something), from one scripted sequence to the next. Your A.I. squad mates are surprisingly skilled too, as aside from set pieces where you absolutely have to be the one to pull the trigger, they do a pretty good job of killing all the bad guys for you.

The worst part is that you spend a somewhat ridiculous amount of time just watching stuff happen. In these sections your character automatically walks along and focuses on stuff the developer wanted you to see and you just sit back and watch. Fun movie, boring videogame. Also troubling about the campaign is the incredible overuse of Quick-Time-Events. Seemingly every couple of minutes a QTE pops up where you press a button and then watch your character jump across a moving train, or fight an enemy in CQC, or stab a damn rat in a sewer.

The story about an uprising in Iran with the threat of nuclear weapons scattered about is definitely interesting. And there are a lot of neat set pieces and absolutely stunningly cool things to see. But the gameplay itself just isn't all that fun. If you were thinking of buying Battlefield 3 for the single-player, don't bother. It isn't awful or anything, but it fails to really stand up next to the campaigns in other shooters - not just modern combat - on the Xbox 360.

Co-Op

There are also a handful (6) co-op missions available. Co-op makes things more fun (always), but even these missions have their share of QTE's and heavy scripting that take you out of the fun more often than we'd like. You can only play on Xbox Live, no local multi options available at all in BF3, and we recommend playing with friends rather than randoms. Co-op is more fun than the campaign, but we wish there were more of it.

Multiplayer

All that out of the way, onto the real draw in Battlefield 3 - the multiplayer. Nine maps of varying sizes cover multiple terrain types from deserts to coastal roads to urban settings and more. Vehicles such as Humvee's and tanks dot the maps, and larger areas even offer helicopters and fighter jets. There are multiple classes of vehicles, with a few variations in each class, and in a neat touch you actually earn specific perks and bonus upgrades for the vehicles when you use them well. So now you level up not just your character and their loadout, but also the way they can use vehicles. Minor damage to vehicles repairs automatically as well, and you now have a few second window to bail out if your vehicle is on the verge of being destroyed. Very cool.

Up to twenty-four players duke it out in teamwork-focused multiplayer modes. Going lone wolf is never really advisable in games like this, but in Battlefield 3 sticking with your team and completing objectives together is the key to victory. Solidifying this fact is the new scoring system that rewards players for suppressing the enemy (suppressing fire makes the enemies have blurred vision and less accuracy). You suppress while your teammates actually get the kill, but you all get points for it. You score points for pretty much everything you do, which makes you a valuable member of the team no matter your skill level and lets you level up to more quickly reach better equipment (and having more fun) without necessarily needing to have the most kills.

There are a couple of other significant changes in BF3. First is the ability to go prone (lay flat on the ground). This lets you hid pretty much anywhere and pick off enemies and you'll be hard to find if you position yourself right. Suppression is the counter to this, though, so by suppressing an area you suspect an enemy to be hiding in, you mess up their accuracy and give teammates time to take them out. Also new is the fact that knives are no longer one-swipe kills. It takes two swipes, or one from behind, to take out an enemy now, which makes close quarters fights much more tense and interesting than before.

No Bots

One complaint we have about the multiplayer is the lack of A.I. bots. Some people don't like playing on Xbox Live with 12 year olds screaming at them and prefer to play with bots. Also, bots would offer a way to actually learn maps and learn to use the vehicles (jets and helicopters in particular have a steep learning curve) and being able to practice offline with bots would have been appreciated. Part of the reason why we liked Gears of War 3 so much is that every single game mode is playable offline with bots. CoDBlOps also had multiplayer bots. It would have made the overall Battlefield 3 package a lot better if 70% of the content wasn't locked away exclusively for online players.

Presentation

Graphically, Battlefield 3 looks outstanding. The single-player campaign has an optional HD texture pack you can install, and we highly recommend that you do if you plan on playing the campaign. Without the HD textures it looks okay - the lighting is the same and other effects are the same, but objects and buildings and stuff look awful when you get close. With the HD texture pack, everything in the game world pops with detail and looks fantastic. Multiplayer maps take a bit of a hit in the graphics department, obviously, with 24 players running around, but they definitely look good. In a bit of a disappointing touch, the levels aren't as destructible as they were in Bad Company 1 and 2. You can still blow holes in some walls and stuff, but it isn't as crazy as it was in BC. Also, we don't love the dust on the camera lens, crazy light bloom lens flare effect that completely obscures your view way too often.

The sound is also very good overall. Solid music. Great sound effects that really put you on the battlefield. And solid voice work in the campaign.

Bottom Line

Ultimately, Battlefield 3 is an easy game to recommend depending on how you answer this question - Are you buying it for the multiplayer? If yes, buy it. You won't be disappointed and don't even have to bother with the mediocre campaign. If no, you don't care about playing multiplayer, you're better off skipping BF3 or just renting it if you enjoy these modern combat-type campaigns. The campaign is short and derivative and literally all of the other content is locked away only for online players. No use paying $60 for a game you can't really play. In the end, Battlefield 3 is among the best games on Xbox 360 in terms of multiplayer, but as a whole package it doesn't quite match up with other shooters. Keep that in mind before you purchase.

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Battlefield 2 Tournament News

Electronic Arts today announced a "Best of the Battlefield" tournament that will feature a $250,000 grand prize for the winning team. You can register for the tournament at at the official Battlefield site starting on November 1st.

“Battlefield 2: Modern Combat raises the bar for online multiplayer action, and EA is making things really interesting with a $250,000 grand prize in the “Best of the Battlefield” tournament,” said EA’s vice president of marketing, Jillian Goldberg. “If you think you or your clan has what it takes to rule the battlefield online, here’s your chance to prove it. Start practicing!”

It should be very exciting!

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Battlefield 2142 Review

Nov 5 2006

It's the year 2142, and rather than melting down from global warming, Earth is in the cold grip of the next ice age. Two factions, the European Union and the Pan-Asian Coalition, are caught in a bitter, high-tech struggle for the planet's few remaining resources. This is the premise behind the latest in the Battlefield series of shooters, Battlefield 2142. Having so far taken us through WWII, Vietnam, and modern warfare, a short leap into the future is a natural fit for a sequel.

Graphics and Interface
Built on the Battlefield 2 engine, the graphics are excellent. They will push the average PC to its limits, but if BF2 runs okay on your system, you should get similar results from BF2142. Fortunately, it scales down very nicely to medium settings. There is an impressive attention to detail on visuals like the heat distortion coming from the engines of the new aircraft, or the garbling effect created by an EMP explosion. Despite slight improvements over BF2 graphics, there remains no widescreen support, and patience is still needed when loading maps.

BF2 players will slip comfortably into the controls for BF2142, since they're practically identical, including the squad and commander interfaces. The futuristic aircraft are a little easier to operate than the planes of earlier games in the series, but they remain quite crashable.

Choose a Weapon
The classes available have been trimmed down to 4 from BF2's 6. You choose from recon, assault, engineer, or support. The assault class now carries a medipack that can be used for healing, and they can unlock more advanced medical equipment, such as the defibrillator that revives fallen teammates. In a departure from the norm, support players can gain access to a sentry gun rather than engineers, who have been given anti-tank and anti-air weapons to compliment their repair abilities.

The unlock system, by which you earn ranks in battle that give you access to better weapons, is very popular in BF2, so they've expanded on it a great deal in BF2142. The unlock tree has been made deeper, providing lots of rewards to strive for, and you start out with just the basics. Even grenades have to be unlocked, although it doesn't take long to get a few ranks under your belt.

The increased emphasis on unlocks does make things rougher for new players, who are at a definite disadvantage in terms of equipment. It changes the FPS dynamic a bit, but I don't expect it to be a serious problem, because you can always jump into a vehicle or a stationary gun and score a few kills that way. This is Battlefield, after all.

High-Tech Gadgets
I find the low-key sci-fi aspect of BF2142 quite appealing. The semi-believable gadgetry, such as communications helmets, personal forcefields, cloaking devices, and drone bodyguards are a riot to mess around with. Better yet, a lot of the unlockable items are designed to encourage and improve team play. The NetBat helmets, for example, allow you to identify which kits the enemy is carrying and relay this information to other members of your squad. Squad leaders can also unlock a beacon that acts as a deployable spawn point, which can make a big difference in the outcome of the battle.

There is already some complaining going on about the camouflage device available to the recon class. It doesn't make you completely invisible, but it does make you difficult to see, especially when you're not moving. To keep it in check, you can't stay camouflaged constantly because the gizmo heats up and has a long cooldown period. On top of that, it emits a high-pitched noise, and there is an unlock in the support kit that can detect cloaked players. Once people get used to them, the counter-measures available should insure that everyone isn't running around camouflaged.

Vehicles
Vehicles are central to Battlefield, and there are a few interesting additions to the arsenal in 2142. The most obvious are the 2-seat Battlewalkers, which are wonderfully designed and simply ooze coolness. Climbing into one of these beasts and unleashing its firepower is pure fun.

The hover tank has also been invented, although only one faction appears to have the technology as the other side is still using tanks with tracks. The biggest advantage of the hover tank is the ability to strafe. Aircraft in BF2142 are like rotorless helicopters, and they seem to have taken care not to make them overwhelming in combat.

Titan Mode
Battlefield fans that have grown weary of Conquest mode will be happy to see that they've finally introduced a new type of gameplay. Titan mode revolves around two large flying fortresses, and requires your team to destroy the enemy Titan before they do the same to you. On the ground, instead of capturing flags, you capture missile silos, which then automatically begin firing at the opposing Titan.

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Battlefield 3 Running At 720p, 30 FPS On Consoles News

We all knew it was coming: console versions of Battlefield 3 won't match the leading PC platform for frames per second and resolution, EA DICE's Rendering Architect, Johan Anderrson has revealed via Twitter.

When asked during a Q&A session if Battlefield 3 would run at 60 frames per second, as it does on PC, Andersson responded, "No we always do 30 fps on consoles, not possible to fit in vehicles, fx, scale and all players otherwise."

He then went on to confirm that consoles have been capped at 720p resolution rather than 1080p, before pointing out that the vast majority of console games run at 30 fps and 720p anyway.

Given the amount of computational power required to run the destructible environments of DICE's impressive looking Frostbite 2.0 engine alongside the amount of action that the Swedish developer typically likes to put on-screen, this news is hardly surprising.

"We think huge levels, lots of players, great fx, destruction, vehicles & varied gameplay is more important than 1080p," Andersson stated. Epic agree as far as we're concerned.

Thanks, Battlefield 3 Blog.

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Battlefield 3 Co-op Has 10 Maps, Supports 2 Players? News

We already knew that Battlefield 3 will have a dedicated co-op mode alongside the standard multiplayer and single-player offerings, but until now gamers hadn't got as much as a sniff of details for this co-op offering.

It's certainly rumour and speculation at this stage, but That VideoGame Blog is reporting on a PSM3 article which alleges that the co-op mode will provide support for 2 players and is set to ship with 10 dedicated maps.

In all likelihood, the mode has been developed by DICE and EA to rival the Zombies mode in Treyarch's Call of Duty games and the very similar Survival mode in this year's Modern Warfare 3. This news of 2 player support also indicates that DICE may have something akin to Modern Warfare 2's Spec Ops mode in mind.

DICE's experiment with co-op in Battlefield: Bad Company 2's Onslaught mode (which was released as DLC in June of last year) had a squad of up to 4 players attempting to capture control points while under siege from AI controlled opponents.

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Battlefield 3 - E3 Multiplayer Preview

The PR machine is in full swing as EA goes head-to-head with Activision over this holiday season's battle to become the number one near-future shooter, with even the main entrance to LA's Convention Centre adorned with the Battlefield 3 banner during this year's E3. Both a first-ever demonstration of the game's tank gameplay and the October 25th release date (giving it a three week head start over Modern Warfare 3) were revealed during EA's press conference, but it was on the showfloor itself that we got our hands on with the game. Battlefield has always been about the multiplayer, and of course this is what EA was so keen to show off at its booth.

EA DICE's veteran Creative Director, Lars Gustavsson, was on-hand to demonstrate all of the new features that Battlefield 3 will include. We'll see a return to the series' excellent vehicle combat, with the fondly remembered fighter jets making a comeback, as well as an all-new tank capable of carrying you and five of your squad-mates around at a time. This could surely be a perfect opportunity to set up some sweet mine multi-kills, or conversely to launch a concentrated attack upon one of the game's multiplayer objectives.

The franchise's famous Rush and Conquest modes are still present, and a supposedly highly sought-after Team Deathmatch mode also rears its ugly head for the first time in a Battlefield game. It's hard to see this as anything other than a pandering to the masses in order to more effectively compete with Infinity Ward's impending behemoth, as all veteran Battlefield players know very well that DICE's games have never been about racking up kills. Whether this focus upon kill counts will hamper the quality of the teamwork and objective-based play of the classic modes remains to be seen, but there is a large and vocal fan-base of the series that is fiercely proud of Battlefield's co-operative distinction from its contemporaries.

Other concessions to the competition are a bombastic, globe-trotting, Neo-Conservative nonsense storyline and customisable dog-tags, to be collected upon knife kills. These playercards, sorry, dog-tags, can show a range of different player information, from clan insignias to air kills to number of stabs, which dynamically update as the player progresses.

In Battlefield 3, players will have the opportunity to gain points without actually killing the enemy, or directly completing objectives. One of the new ways they can do this is by laying down suppressing fire, covering the advance of their team-mates and scoring points for doing so. Also included is a personal torch for each soldier, so that the darker tunnels and caves can be navigated with greater illumination, though this certainly leaves room for tactical stealth play when they're turned off. For the first time in an FPS, we're told, players can now mount their LMG weapons onto pretty much any surface, granting them greater accuracy and stability, at a cost to mobility. Even players who use guns other than LMGs will finally be able to go prone, as the game now lets you shimmy down onto your stomach in the same way Call of Duty has allowed for years.

When actually in control, it feels much more agile than ever before. Strafing and leaping around flows smoothly, and navigating round and over obstacles is both easy and stylish. The city of Paris and its underlying network of subways were the setting for the map we played; Frostbite 2's awesome engine rendered the environments in stunning detail and furthermore, let you tear it apart. Blowing huge holes in buildings and shattering enemy cover is par for the course here, and it's amazing to see the environments crumble as the matches progress.

In a closely-fought victory against other E3 attendees, TVG came out on top, commanding an elite squad of four journalists through each wave of explosive objectives in Rush mode. Countless hours of Bad Company surely contributed to our success, and it's quite indicative of how similar this game plays to DICE's most recent Battlefield release. However, that was always to be expected, and Battlefield 3 looks set to be the biggest and best Battlefield title yet, with minor but carefully placed improvements in every area. As it heads into the last few months of development it will be interesting to see what elements they can conjure up to differentiate it from Modern Warfare 3, which at the moment looks to be almost indistinguishably good.

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