Battlefield Bad Company 2 completely wowed me last year, not only was it an excellent game in both multiplayer and singleplayer, but it was a good entry for a first person shooter style that I previously didn’t enjoy. Military shooters in general has its own crowd, but coming out of the Doom school of shooters, they do tend to bore me. Not Battlefield: Bad Company 2 though, while it was much like all the other military shooters, it was actually fun and had me playing for a good portion of last year. Battlefield 3 is now here, and we will review the single player and the multiplayer seperately in order to give each a fair assessment. 

You take on the role of several soldiers (and a few others outside of the US Army) in the US army under the narration of a soldier being questioned over his role in a war against the PLR in Iran after a nuclear attack in France involving a military leader . Personally I did not enjoy the story of the game, it didn’t feel as charming (CHARM!! IN A MILITARY FPS! WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT!?) or as fun as the one in bad company 2. The characters barely had any personality. Many parts of the story are explained through a series of video cutscenes rather than in game ones, that turned me off a lot in Deus Ex: Human revolution, especially since all the cutscenes in Bad Company 2 were in fact in game ones (so were the ones in Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine).

While the last Medal of Honor was made by a different developer, the single player campaign did feel a lot like MOH’s campaign than Bad Company 2’s. That’s not a bad thing if you ask me, I personally enjoyed the MOH campaign. but even with that the Battlefield campaign seems to be lacking in the fun department. It is a consistent series of set pieces, with many of them that are actually entertaining, but something about the whole experience just doesn’t add up very well.

Where Battlefield 3 excels is definitely in presentation, graphics and sound design is definitely above and beyond a lot of things we’ve seen in the past, and as far as I understand it, the game scales very well on lower end machines. Frostbite 2 seems extremely well optimized as opposed to what many speculated, even with my year old set up I was able to churn out pretty good performance out of the highest graphical settings. The weakest link in the presentation though is the signs in the Iranian scenery, Shiekh Zayed Road signs with broken arabic alphabet and night clubs (IN IRAN!) with “shake shake the dog loves cats” written on their signs in Arabic.

I have been told that the main focus of Battlefield 3 is in fact the multiplayer, which would probably explained the fairly disappointing single player campaign.

What We Think: When I first started playing Battlefield Bad Company 2, I was focusing on the singleplayer and didn’t realize how grand the multiplayer was (sue me, I never played those kind of games until I gave Bad Company 2 a go). Coming into Battlefield, I’ve been playing the single player and impatiently wanting to finish it in order to hop to the multiplayer, maybe that’s why I found the singleplayer campaign a little underwhelming. Nevertheless, Bad Company 2 and Medal of Honor had the better singleplayer campaigns of this style of shooters, you might as well go for either (or both) if you’re looking for that kind of experience. Onward to the Multiplayer (soon!).