BOX ART. It's all...box...art...and stuff.
I'm not a complete idiot. I know that most of you aren't going to be buying/pirating/borrowing/renting Battlefield 3 for it's campaign. Or even for it's co-op. But that does not mean these should be ignored. After I have played a significant amount of the multiplayer, I will write a review for it, so watch for it early next week.
The co-op in Battlefield 3 has six missions, unlocked in a tiered structure. Which is just pointless, seeing as there are only six missions. If the first two are anything to go by, though, they offer a decent length per mission. Having only completed one mission of the six, and 10 minutes of another, I still feel justified in calling it complete and utter shit. Yay for shitty server issues making co-op a hassle to play with friends! These missions have no checkpoints, and not even a quick-restart option, kicking you back to mission select after each failure. If, after completing them all, I feel my opinion has changed significantly, I will re-review co-op in my multiplayer review.
Pretty much all of the environmental destruction you'll see in the campaign.
The campaign fares better than the co-op, but not by much. The narrative it tells isn't actually half-bad, focusing on Sgt. Blackburn as he recalls the events leading up to the starting sequence of the game. It tells the usual tale of nukes and terrorists, with a clearly established villain and no shades of grey. It's a generic story, but a well-told one. The common framing device of an interrogation, with pressure on the clock to convince your handlers to believe you about the terrorist threat, works as well here as it did in last year's Black Ops. It lacks the mystery of your captors' identities, but adds the pressure of an imminent threat. I still can't name anyone besides Blackburn, though, so the characters themselves are lacking.
The gameplay of the campaign, sadly, doesn't manage to reach even the average heights of the plot. There is nothing wrong with linearity and scripted events in shooters, but this campaign is so linear that you rarely even have room to flank enemy positions or move around. And when you do, the game will punish you with a giant countdown to "get back in the fight" or fail.It is so tightly scripted that the moment you pull at the thread, the whole thing unravels. In the very first "real" mission, you are pinned down by a sniper, so I kept peaking over cover trying to spot him on the adjacent building. After many deaths, I found out that I had to wait a few minutes for my squad to progress, pick up the RPG they drop, and then shoot it at the sniper who doesn't physically exist. A mid-game stealth mission has your partner tell you that an enemy is watching the street, and so I looked up, shot him, and then 5 seconds later the game had my partner tell me where to shoot, despite me already having killed the man. Thankfully, the game still progressed normally. As an extreme example, at one point in the game you are waiting for your teammates to open a door, as usual. With no warning, and having never established this as a gameplay mechanic, an enemy blasts through the door with a shotgun. Since many players will impatiently stand in front of the door waiting for the AI to open it, I regard this as a very cheap death that sets the player back a good two minutes. The second time through, I rushed ahead in a mad fervor, killing all of the enemies and blasting the shotgun-man to bits through the hole he created. This was too fast for the game, as the AI would not open the door and I had to resort to suicide, setting me back another two minutes. Two minutes doesn't sound like much, but in a campaign this insultingly short, every minute counts. Yes, Battlefield 3 falls prey to the modern trend of short campaigns by delivering one of the shortest of them all. Clocking in at about 4 1/2 hours, including deaths, this game makes those modern 6-7 hour shooters look like a Peter Jackson film's game equivalent.
The missions try to protagonist hop, like a certain other FPS series, but really doesn't understand how to do it properly. There is no established character introduction, and even less chronological sense, judging from my comprehension of the timeline. In your first character hop, you switch to a female (dialogue-less) jet pilot, which provides the best part of the campaign. While it is an on-rails segment, with you merely controlling the gunner seat, it still offers a good sense of atmosphere and fun, even though it offers zero challenge. A later mission has you controlling a tank, and is not on-rails, only to end up being far too short and even having some bits out of the tank's driver seat. The final protagonist would be falling into spoiler territory, but offers the usual on-foot infantry action.
FOLLOW is your primary objective in this game. DO IT OR DIE.
None of this is helped by the excessive use of lens flare, blinding flashlights, and dense environments. All of these come together to make a shooter where it can sometimes be nearly impossible to pick out targets until they have already fired upon you. The game even lacks the environmental destruction and vehicles of the Bad Company games, managing to not even come close to the already low bar that series had set for DICE campaigns. If you need a non-CoD military shooter campaign to have some fun with, I highly recommend Medal of Honor over this. I had fun in that, at least.
/review
LOL. BATTLEFIELD 3 ON A CONSOLE. LOL.
