Battlefield 3: Oorah

    Ah, November, one of my favorite times of the year. Three of my favorite things in the world happen in November: the leaves fall, Thanksgiving brings the family together, and all the fall games releases go public. The theme this year is First Person Shooters, so with that in mind, let’s talk about one I knew I would never be able to get away with avoiding, Battlefield 3.

     First things first: the only Battlefield game I had played before this one was Battlefield 2, and I only played that one briefly. Just keep in mind that I’m not an expert on this series. Nay, I shall be examining it as an every-gamer. 

Plot and characters

     I barely played the campaign. I know from my friends and all the reviews that the Battlefield series is all about the multiplayer, so that’s where I focused my attention for this review. 

     Here’s what I know: You play a guy called Black (short for Blackburn), a U.S. Marine whom you possess right as he is being brought in for interrogation by CIA agents for-something. Truth be told, I never made it that far, nor did I really care. 

     Anyway, Black tells the agents what happened during his tour in Iraq/Iran (I mention both names because it kept mentioning the border and the borders of those countries shift more than a politician facing allegations of corruption). As he tells his story, you play through his various flashbacks as he fights against the People’s Liberation and Resistance, a faction of Iranian rebels out to cause trouble for the establishment. 

     There’s really not much more to say. The voice acting is ok, and I did find the one Hispanic Marine who constantly dispenses anti-American sentiments an interesting character, but none of that really masks the truth: that we’re Marines (again) in the Middle-East (again) shooting at terrorists and later Russians (again). I don’t actually know if there are Russians, but since the multiplayer is U.S. Marines vs. Russian Insurgents, I assume they make at least a cameo somewhere in the campaign. 

Gameplay

     I’ll be talking about most of this in the multiplayer section, but as far as single-player goes, gameplay is fine. You shoot the various guns and the clone-stamped enemies die. You can’t ask for much more than that. 

     There are also varying degrees of difficulty, if you’re interested in more of a challenge. What this basically amounts to is enemies gaining increasingly BS accuracy, which I found frustrating when I was in cover and still somehow catching the occasional odd bullet. 

     But, like I said before, who cares about all that? We’re here to get our multiplayer on. 

Multiplayer

     It’s good. Not perfect by any means, but still very good. 

     If there’s one thing I’ve noticed about being a games critic, though, it’s that no one pays attention when I’m on the bandwagon with the other 50 million critics out there, so let me get the praise out of the way very quickly so we can get nit-picky: It’s very intense, it’s very pretty, it has considerable replay value compared to other multi-player shooters out there, and despite everything I’m about to say about it, it’ll still probably be my favorite shooter of the year. 

     Right, now let’s talk about complaints.

     There’s the usual one, of course: that the online community is like a troop of hyperactive baboons, yelling obnoxiously into their headsets and flinging verbal fecal matter at each other like they haven’t learned even the most basic forms of social etiquette. Sadly technology has not reached the point where we can reach through our TVs and punch them in the face, so we just have to put up with it for now. 

     That’s not really a tic against Battlefield, though, it’s just an observation. 

     But, since we’re ranting about the game’s players, let me ask this question: why the hell doesn’t anyone spot their targets anymore? If you’ve played Battlefield 2, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I swear I’m the only person who did it in any of the games I played. Spot, people! It helps your team, it helps you find enemies in big dust clouds, and you get points for it, so there’s no excuse not to!

     One complaint I have against the game itself is that it has a nasty habit of placing you on the losing team right as the game is ending whenever you first join the online sector. On several occasions I would wake up, choose my class of warrior, and be dually informed that I had lost the match. Then the scoreboard shows up, with me having zeros across the board. I hope the programmers were smart enough not to make those count against me.     

     Anyway, I found that recon was my favorite class, mostly because it meant that my alter-ego Captain Courage could lie prone under a massive rock several hundred meters from the frantic explody mess and pick off the occasional passer-by with a massive sniper rifle. Perhaps not the most sporting way of doing things, but I don’t think I can be faulted much for it since everyone rushes for the tanks and jets right at the beginning so that they can “pwn noobz” as if being able to flatten a soldier with eight tons of steel and a 125mm cannon makes you a candidate for a Bronze Star. 

     Speaking of vehicles, I have yet to have a chance to fly a jet for the aforementioned reason of everyone running to grab them at the beginning of the match, so I don’t know anything about the aerial combat. I once managed to snag a helicopter, but being unfamiliar with its controls, it only took about 20 seconds for me to embed it in the ground. 

     I tried the other classes, but found them lacking. The Assault class is meant to be on the frontline, with a standard rifle and the ability to heal (and at higher levels revive) teammates. The engineer gets an RPG and can repair vehicles, but I wasn’t interested in that, either. The support gunner gets a massive machinegun, but when I tried it the recoil was so bad that shooting it was like wresting with the aforementioned baboons.

     No, my place was clearly on recon, marking targets for my teammates and gaining smug satisfaction from firing at a speck in my scope and seeing the words “enemy killed” flash up on my screen. That said, there’s no end to the frustration when someone does it to me! 

Overall

     As I said before, please don’t take my complaints to mean that Battlefield 3 is a bad game, because it certainly isn’t. It’s definitely well above average, too. I actually thought it was pretty excellent, despite the fact that I’m really not that good at it. 

     I’m not on board with the fanboy crowd, either. I don’t believe that Battlefield 3 is video games’ Messiah and that all should kneel humbly in its presence as it allows strangers to blast our heads off with a 50 cal. like so many others seem to. Despite how great it is, it’s still a shooter, and I’ve had quite enough of those lately since HALO Reach is all my friends EVER want to play. No, I think I’ll be saving my enthusiasm for Skyrim, a sequel I’ve only been waiting five bloody years for. 

     Investment suggestion: Buy it. I played the multiplayer for hours at a time and I’m not even big fan of shooters. If you are a fan of shooters, the game is good enough that it should make up for getting fired for skipping out on work to play it. 

The above is only my opinion. It just happens to be right.

Where to Purchase

Here's some great local places to pick up Battlefield 3: , , , and .