Read before buy. Unbiased review here.
Single player portion :
The game had a very interesting premise. A bunch of goofballs cracking jokes every now and then, with cool mo-cap cutscenes and lots of redneck music. Sounds like a pretty cool action movie to me, and it seemed fairly interesting. The game, otherwise, didn't totally deliver on it.
First of all, the story is pretty underdevelopped, and could have been much better. I'm a writter ( for a french canadian magazine, and no, english ain't my mother tongue, so sorry for the typos. ) and I get food on my table that way, so that may be why i'm disapointed with what they've come with.
Like I said, the premise was awesome, but overall it was poorly executed.
I've seen some pretty goofy moments, but most of them were online trailers exclusivities, wich is completely stupid ( like the MGS4 parody ). DICE could have added them very easily into the game, but they chose not to.
Still, you've got some pretty funny moments to see , but the best ones where in the trailers shown on various websites and yet, absent from the game.
Alright so whats the point of complaining about the story in a BF game ? You're right, lets move on.
Gameplay.
The whole gimmick of blowing walls up seemed pretty interesting, but when you realise that every single house in this game is designed the same way, and that every single one of them are lacking DOORS ( what the hell DICE, no doors on houses ?! ), it gets pretty sketchy. None of them have anything in them, they're just there for you to blow up, wich is dumb. I love me some destruction, yet this game makes it feel forced when all the buildings are presented with the same textures and lack of everything. Once you'll get into a president pallace, wich is ENTIRELY empty.
That said, the game offers you lots of interesting and new weapons to tool with. While they are all good looking and fun to shoot, they all feel the same. From the vast array of assault rifles offered to you, they all more or less have the same recoil and damage ( even if the stats shows there's supposedly differences ).
Wich means, I can kill a dude while spray and praying with any variant of the AK, or the XM8 and the AUG with the same results. I wasn't expecting total realism, but then again, it feels kinda flat.
The vehicules have pretty bad controls to them ( left trigger to accelerate, what the hell ? OK for tanks, but they should let you switch it, and you can't. ) and their physics is pretty goofy. It happened to me a lot to just bump in a small rock or unmovable wood crates and then see my entire vehicule spin on itself. The helicopters are okay to control, but they're overpowered since you've got infinite missile, wich is bad, because in the last BF installements, you needed to go refill sometimes, adding a realistic break on your rampage.
You can collect gold bars and weapons, but all this is useless. The gold bars don't give you anything but achievements ( wich is dumb considered the premise of the game ) and as for the weapons collectables, you can't even select them at the begining of the level, they'll give you your trusty M4 ALL the time except for one mission.
Your Squad-mates are a bunch of brainless monkeys, and you'll have to kill everyone on your own, because if they actually SHOOT BACK, be prepared to call that a memorable moment. Haggard has a rocket launcher on his back, and not once he used it to destroy one of the dozens of tanks I've fought in the game. Once I was just strafing around a tank, waiting for Haggard to shoot ( he had his rocket launcher aimed at the vehicule ) and after 3 mins, he didn't shot, leaving me to run away and get killed since I had no C4/rockets.
As for the MP, I guess it's all a matter of personnal opinion, but with only one game mode and uninteresting unlocks that can be all gathered pretty fast, the game got boring pretty quickly for me. Plus, the fun you'll have is entirely up to weither or not your allies are competent, and not everybody has mates who owns the game. Weapons have a supreme arcade feel to them, and no matter wich one you'll use, it won't change the course of your performance. AR have about 50 bullets per clip each ( okay..what the hell ) and submachine guns CAN'T be aimed in the iron sight ( what..the..f).
Once I was shooting a dude, and he ran towards a tank and instantly popped inside and killed me with a well launched shell. A friend of mine was passing by and she said, '' what the hell, did he just teleported in that tank and automatickly shot you ? '' and I said like..yeah, it seems so.
I think that DICE should evolve the BF games and at least get some mounting animations to make the whole thing feel a little more believable and less frustrating, just like that tank moment.
Overall, I feel like the game could have been much better, and yet it failed on many levels of its execution. Bland level design, empty houses and buildings without doors, underdevelopped characters and disapointing cinematics compared to those shown to hype the game makes it a game that can be describe has '' almost, but not really. ''