Battlefield 3 PC Review

[wpcol_1half id=”” class=”” style=””]Finally the time has come! I get to play one of the games I’ve been most looking forward to getting my grubby little mitts on this year. Since hearing that Battlefield 3 ‘may be a possibility’ back in May 2009, I twiddled my thumbs anxiously waiting for a trailer to appear. I personally loved Bad Company and Bad Company 2 so was really looking forward to the release of BF3 – especially the multiplayer aspect of the game.

Needless to say that when I found out the multiplayer beta was an open one, I jumped straight in. I loved the feeling when running around, especially when your squad members actually stayed within a decent Radius and played well as a team, however there was one element that really got on my nerves… Origin. Yes, yes, I know it’s not technically actually a part of BF3 but having to launch it to enable you to play makes it good enough a reason to complain. If you fancy a good laugh, you can actually find a 23 minute long video of my MP beta experience here.

Cracking on, October 2011, we have the release of BF3 in its Glorious Frostbite 2 engine! Personally I think the graphics are superb and they’re not overly demanding on your hardware either. Running at 1920×1080 on Ultra settings sees me putting out around 40FPS on an AMD 1100T, 8GB Ram and a HD6950 system.

In Battlefield 3, we see three different types of games, Single player, Multiplayer and Co-Op. The single player campaign sees you playing through the eyes of Staff Sergeant Henry Blackburn, along with 3 other characters that don’t feature quite so often.

Throughout the single player campaign you’re deployed throughout a few different locations primarily based around theIraqandIranborders.  However you’re technically retelling your story, presumably to Internal Affairs or the CIA, but I won’t go any further as it’s an integral part of the story! Between each of the missions you play you’ll be able to watch a cinematic that will reveal more and more of the story as you progress through the campaign.

Personally I enjoyed the single player element of the game, I’ll admit that I did only play it through on normal difficulty, but my god did I die a lot! The AI seem to have a knack for knowing exactly where you are even if you’re prone and move around without anybody seeing you. Not only that, it’s extremely difficult to pinpoint where the fire is coming from with all the knock back you receive when you get hit, sure the marker that appears on your screen helps, but as the AI is more often than not hiding and not easily visible. It can become rather frustrating…

The single player campaign lasted me roughly 7 hours, so it’s about average when it comes to shooters of a similar style. Though to be honest, while I did enjoy playing through this time around I don’t think I’ll be playing it through again any time soon. As there’s no actual benefit from doing so I don’t see it being a game with a lot of replayability.

The Co-Op side of the game is a welcome change, more so for some players as they enjoy playing with friends, but not quite in full on action multiplayer. As it stands there are six different multiplayer levels to choose from in the Co-Op, however you can only access two at the beginning. Completing the first two will unlock the third mission, completing this will in turn unlock the fourth and fifth. Only after completing missions one through five will you unlock the sixth and final mission.

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[wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]Through the Co-Op, when you get shot to bits, you don’t instantly die. You’ll ‘bleed out’ and can shuffle around with a pistol while waiting for your partner to help you up, very similar to perks found in other games. However if you both bleed out at the same time, you’ve failed the mission. Doing this can also be quite frustrating as no matter where you are progression wise, 10% or 95% complete…. you have to start again from the very beginning. Rather annoying losing 25-30 minutes worth of gameplay to start again.

There are two benefits from Co-Op though.. 1) Bragging rights! You gain points when doing the missions, more points are earned dependant on which difficulty you select, as with single player there’s easy, normal and hard. As long as you have friends on EA’s Battlelog you’ll see your friend’s leaderboard.  2) Multiplayer weapon unlocks! In total there are 7 things to unlock that are useable in multiplayer, so replaying the Co-Op does have its benefits, not to mention it’ll be different each time as you’ll be with different friends.

When it comes to the multiplayer element of BF3, if you’ve played one of the previous 10 battlefield games – it’ll probably be rather familiar to you. When entering an MP game, you pick one of four classes to play as – Assault, Support, Engineer or Recon. As you play each of these classes you’ll gain experience.

There’s two different types of experience to be gained however, there’s the general experience that will unlock items that can be used on multiple weapons and increase your rank in the game, then there’s also the class experience. For example, if I played as Assault for my preferred class, it wouldn’t be long before I unlocked the defibrillators to revive downed team mates to co-inside with my med kits for healing them. Obviously each class has their own special perks and everybody will differ in which they prefer.

Besides the experience gained above, each weapon will have attachments that can be unlocked when you get more kills with it, for example you may unlock an RDS (Red Dot Sight) for your assault rifle after 50 kills. Now if just running around on foot and shooting everybody you see, preferably not your team mates, mind… is not quite your thing, then you’ll be happy to hear the game has vehicles just like the previous BF releases.

Tanks, Helicopters, Jets… Things that make you go BOOM! I for one tend to stay away from anything air related as I just can’t pilot them… tanks though, are another story entirely. The multiplayer levels are all well designed and with the ability to have up to 64 player battles on the PC version, you can spend hours in BF3 carnage while making your way up the leaderboards.

All in all, although I’ve seen many people say they’re disappointed in this game after all the hype, it’s still definitely worth the buy – especially for the multiplayer element! The singleplayer is worth the play through at least once and you’d probably enjoy the co-op with your friends.

…..Just don’t get me started on Origin!

Battlefield 3 is definitely worth this award!

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