Battlefield 3

A tank explodes next to you, your buddy is laying dead on the ground. Quickly you revive him, moving forward against the Russians. A RPG whips by your head and you manage to retaliate and take him down. You start taking fire and things get hazy, falling back into cover. You lob a grenade and manage to take out two enemies you push forward and capture the hill. This is exactly what I experienced playing DICE's new shooter Battlefield 3. Produced by DICE and published by EA, this game makes teamwork an essential part of victory After a couple years since the release of Battlefield 2, Frostbite 2 makes its debut on the highly anticipated sequel. This new graphics engine will make the environment  more destructible, along with being more detailed. There is a entire single player campaign as well as a Co-op mode and full 32 player multiplayer (64 on the PC). First however there is the campaign.

The campaign in Battlefield 3 is an entirely separate experience. With the story being told in flashbacks you try and explain to this officer what you know about New York being in danger. You go through the last couple weeks of what happened leading up to the point of where you start at. Not wanting to give to much away I won't cover to much more of the story. The game play in the campaign is simply a shooting gallery with some vehicle levels thrown in to mix it up. The game tries really hard to keep you on the same path because if you wander at all you just fall over and die. This breaks the immersion and can get frustrating when you don't know why you did actually die. There really is not a whole lot to say about this campaign, it does feel a lot like Modern Warfare's story but the controls are different obviously. Now the meat of this game is in the multiplayer, that is where the most depth and fun lies.

The multiplayer in Battlefield 3 is a very enjoyable experience. There are a several modes of play, there is conquest, rush, squad rush, team deathmatch, and squad deathmatch. The big ones to play are the conquest mode and the rush mode. Conquest is where your team tries to capture these locations and hold them whiling pushing against the enemy team. If you control more points than the other team their tickets will go down faster. The object is to empty your opponents ticket pool to zero before they empty yours. One ticket is worth one player spawning on the appropriate team. Rush mode is where there is an attacking side and a defending side. The attackers want to arm and destroy these MCOM stations. While the defenders want to defuse the bombs and prevent the attackers from destroying the points. The defenders win if they get the attackers tickets to zero and the attackers win if they blow up all the stations. The difference with squad rush is that it is 4 v 4 and there is only one MCOM station to destroy per area. The team deathmatch is just standard first to however many kills will win. Another big thing that is in the multiplayer would be the vehicles, with there being jets, helicopters, tanks, jeeps, and amphibious assault units, this game has them all. These vehicles add a element to the game that keeps you on your toes and gives the engineer class a purpose. There are four classes in the multiplayer these include: Assault, wielding the defibrillators and the assault rifles, Support, giving ammo and using light machine guns, Engineer, can repair vehicles and uses rockets, lastly Recon, using sniper rifles along with some support abilities. These four classes are all loaded with tons of stuff to unlock and many ribbons to earn while playing as them. Overall the multiplayer is where most of the time went into developing this game and it has paid off.

There are several things that this game does well, for one being able to feel the recoil in the guns being just right, along with the sound of the gunfire in the distance. This keeps you feeling immersed, like you are in a war. This keeps you intrigued and only breaks when you die and looking at the deploy screen. Now the bad... this game does not do a good job of balancing, there is a constant one sided gameplay where one team will dominate the other for several rounds and there is never any auto balancing. This can take away the fun of the game. Now you can switch teams if this happens to you but in order to keep it fair you can only do it so often. Also the lag on some of the servers can make the game almost unplayable. When you almost get to cover but end up teleporting backwards and getting picked off is a very frustrating occurrence that happens way to often. Looking for low ping servers help but the server browser being a webpage has its own issues, where it will say there are several spaces open but when you join, the game is full. Other then that the server browser works well enough to get  you in games with less waiting around. The battlelog is the new way to experience battlefield for those who play this game on the PC. I do not personally have a problem with it. The new way to launch a game makes sense but it feels like there can be some problems if the website goes down or playing the single player while offline. Overall though this game is fun just the launch week blues dragging it down in some big ways.

I give this game a 9.5/10 with some issues keeping it from greatness it is definitely a must buy for anyone who is a first person shooter fan. DICE managed to deliver and released a well polished shooter. I can play this game for five hours straight and not want to put it down. This game just scratches that itch I have had since I stopped playing Bad Company 2. So all together a great solid game with some issues that need to be addressed before it can really be at a point of absolute greatness. It is available for Xbox, Playstation, and PC. If you can choose between all three I would recommend going with the PC version for the 64 player battles.