Final Thoughts

When all was said and done, Battlefield 3’s single-player campaign lasted me around 6 hours on ‘Hard’, the highest difficulty setting. Playing that way probably made me die many more times than I otherwise would have because the bullets hit a lot harder; I just didn’t want to struggle with any aim assist, which is apparently enabled even on ‘Normal’ difficulty. I did come to rue that decision at a few points, where frustrations reached heights only made possible by endlessly respawning enemies (only in one particular instance, thank jeebus) and already overwhelming odds made seemingly insurmountable by the AI’s lightning reflexes and dead-eye aim. In the end, though, success is determined by your ability to smash ‘E’, ‘Space’, or ‘LMB’ when the game prompts you to…

The premise of the plot is pretty generic, with terrorists buying portable nuclear bombs from a Russian arms dealer, and then attempting to blow up big cities like Paris and New York while you try to stop them. I will give DICE some credit for attempting to put a morally-ambiguous twist or two in there, but I don’t think it’s enough to overcome the clichés. For example, the most glaring involved one of the bad guys plainly divulging critical information just seconds before his death, despite the fact that he hates us and hopes we all burn in hell… BF3 also falls into the trap of trying too hard to evoke emotion from the player when you real reason to have such feelings… Regardless of my character supposedly being the best of friends with his squad mates, they’re wholly-interchangeable with any other disposable AI teammate as far as I’m concerned, which just makes it seem silly when part of the story is shaped around these non-existent sentiments.





As was the case with Bad Company 2, the only other Battlefield campaign we PC gamers have ever seen, BF3’s single-player made for some decent afternoon entertainment in anticipation of the title’s multiplayer component kicking off last night. You get a good amount of practice with a variety of weapons from both the American and Russian factions, and the globe-trotting storyline shows you some interesting sights. Sadly, that’s about all it’s good for, so I doubt I’ll ever be revisiting it. The infantry combat that comprises the majority of the game is unremarkable at best, barring a decent amount of sniping in certain levels, which I’m a huge sucker for. Otherwise the most enjoyable portion was driving a tank in line with your battalion and dueling with enemy armor, but that was much too brief for my liking. If DICE was trying to make the campaign a substantial part of the Battlefield 3 experience, I’m afraid they’ve failed. At the very least, it didn’t hold a candle to the hype they built up, like a Hollywood film that shows all its best parts in the trailer (see below).




Be sure to keep an eye out for the rest of the Battlefield 3 review, including multiplayer discussion and the final verdict, later this week!