Above and beyond the call? Not quite!!!
Graphics: No one can deny the brilliance of EA new frostbite engine. In one particular trailer they mixed real firefights with in-game ones and no doubt about it i couldn't tell them apart, and yet that's not the best of it, the best of it is that no matter which settings you choose the overall looks wont be affected, that of course on the PC. And thats were EA pulls the first hat, on us.The PC version of BF3 looks amazing, its from it that all the trailers were made but go to the consoles and you might me dissapointed. blurry textures and lower framerates haunt every aspect of it. Guess you could say this one of those cases which the game was made for the PC and then ported to the consoles. Again dissapointing.
Singleplayer: Okay for the most part, although DICE made the most unforgivable mistake of all. In their attempt to overthrow COD from the FPS throne they made the mistake of doing exactly what they did, and worst of all failing at it. Instead of the great open battlfields and the incredible variety of ways to aproach a situation, now you have CODs narrow corridors and rollecoaster shooting, its not like it aint good but with it they sacrificed the most important aspect of battfield, destructive enviroments, instead of destroying a building or a whole wall to get to your opponent, now you have to shoot youre way to him, and with the oh so awful it sucks AI aimbot system it makes it quite hard to enjoy. AI enemies have perfect aim, and as soon as they spot you then wont let go until youre dead, theyve basically become cod like dumb target practice, even worse in fact. I didnt want to troll this much but this became particularly annoying to me because EA passed its whole time before release claiming that this was better than cod, that this was made to surpass cod and yet in that attempt it as become cod, and that for me is unforgivable.
Multiplayer: The only thing saving battlefield from utter failure, the multiplayer is pumped and full of new toys and gadgets for everybody to enjoy. Each player as the chance between 4 classes, assault(basic assault rifle and medical kits), enginner( rocket launchers and repair tools), support( heavy machine guns and ammo crates), and recon(sniper rifles and spawn beacons), each with its own paper in the battlefield, inside each class you can have a sidearm and one main gun, being the last one fully customisable. And boy talk about goodys, each gun as different barrels, surpressors, underbarrel attachments and around 7 different kinds of sights, 7 DIFFERENT KINDS and thats not counting the russian ones whcih are another 7. Yet there are some weapons that EA should definitely rethink, i mean grenade launchers and shotguns with fragrounds can ruin a game in maps like metro, simply for the fact that theyre so easy to spawn. Still, the amount of customization will garante game variety and player differetiation, increasing the need for teamwork and a good team, and this is where once again battlefield fails.
If you have a fairly large group of friends and you can get everyone to play with you at the same time then you will have the time of you life. Otherwise good luck, the fact that most of the time players dont speak amongst them or help each other make this game fail in its main purpose, make players work together to suceed. Unless youre in good team and manage to do your part in the grande fight, youll be dieing an unreasonable amount of time and achieving nothing, just managing to become more bored than you were when you started the game. The word here is fun factor and the fact is battlfield most times asks too much of you until you can get to the fun part.
Story: Probably the most disappointing part of Battlefield, even if the game was made to be majorly a multiplayer centered game, if they made a singleplayer at least they should have made an effort to make a good story, but again they followed the example of cod, and went for the big arabic bad guy with nukes to blow in major citys.
You are a soldier of the marine corp called Blackburn, and youre being interrogated as to what happened while you were on the field and whats youre relation to a russiam spetznaz called Dima. The whole story is told trough flashbacks, very much like what happened in black ops, and it actually becomes interesting, but it fails to ever grab you, the motivations behind the characthers or the bad guys is uncertain and even when youre teammates die its hard to feel for them when nothing happened between you and them. Even the story finishes in an unsatisfying way, again very disappointing.
Battlefield could have been great, could have been awesome, it could have been it! It has it all, vehicles, weapons, maps and even the servers to handle them, but it fails in that it became what it was trying to surpass and thats unforgivable.