Battlefield 3 Review: Part One, Launch and Single Player Campaign

With various previews and news about Battlefield 3, we have already read enough, it’s time to start playing the game itself. No more beta tests, special showings of individual levels for journalists, or stands at gaming exhibitions – ahead of us are only gameplay and patches. The main dish of BF3 is, of course, the multiplayer, but we still need to reach it by installing all the necessary add-ons, and it wouldn’t hurt to first try playing the single-player missions out of curiosity. Who knows, maybe it will be fun. For now, we are playing the single-player.

As we know, the licensed BF3 cannot live without the Origin service, the new gadget called Battlelog, a nasty, nasty gadget called Battlelog. After the initial installation in the “Steam replacement” from Electronic Arts, the client traditionally started complaining and demanding a reinstallation. Well, it doesn’t matter to us, we are tough, we download the 10GB game from scratch. In other words, having accepted the fate of a loser, we forget about the desire to fully immerse ourselves in BF3 on the day of release, leave the computer on overnight, and go to sleep.

Hooray, the game is installed. It’s installed and asks to install something else for proper operation. BF3 brought its poor relative Battlelog to the party and demands that we pay due attention to it and give it a place on the hard drive. As soon as the game statistics service settled on my hardware, our orphan started showing its character. Don’t pour him this juice, he won’t eat this pizza, and he won’t dance to the Opera browser. Oh, and good news – now the game shortcut is strictly on the internet, on the EA service website, and BF3 will only launch after going to the browser. Well, that is if you bought a licensed game key.

The current situation with protected content owners is amusing. If before (in most cases) pirated games could only be launched after clever dances with firewalls, soldered with virus keygens and cracks, as well as several days of consultations on forums with the same lovers of free stuff, just like the unlucky gamer-freeloader, and a licensed copy of the game meant “take it and go”, now everything is the opposite – pirated versions with shuffled game content are simply installed and launched, but with legal products, it’s not so simple anymore. So those who are sorry for the money should have been joined by those who are sorry for the time spent on fussing around.

A user hardened in battles with internet services knows – all possible browsers must be installed on the PC at once. Battlelog quickly made friends with Firefox (according to quick tests, Google Chrome is also OK), and after the debut appearance on the dance floor and saving the game progress to EA’s cloud storage, it even made friends with Opera. It kept grumbling about “Your web browser is not fully supported, soldier! You can look around here, talk to friends, but you can’t join their game.”, but it was better than nothing.

Hooray again. We finally entered the game. While we are not playing in online battles, we can leave the graphics at more or less high settings and tolerate the low – around 30 – FPS indicator. Especially since the local campaign implies some cinematography. At first (what will happen next, I don’t know yet), it is expressed in engine cutscenes and enemies falling on heads in multi-story buildings according to the script. Both of these things, I must admit, look great. The picture on the screen is truly dynamic – something is constantly happening all around, someone is shouting, shooting somewhere, and if everything is quiet and calm, you feel it in your gut – something is not right here, crazy action is about to start soon. Well, everything is quite beautiful and realistic, as realistic as an action-packed thriller can be.

Following the letter of the plot in an FPS can be taken to the point of absurdity. Sometimes you get the feeling that when BF3 suggests replaying a location, it’s not death as a result of being filled with lead, but the director jumping out of his chair, waving his hands, and shouting, “No, no, who plays like that, where are you going out of the frame, who are you shooting at!”

Scene on the roof, take one. The squad bursts in from the stairwell, and then some random sniper almost hits me – knocking over the flower pot on the edge of the roof. The squad quickly transitions to crawling, but I’m not so easily flattened. Or maybe I am; a few steps later, it’s not me who lies down on the floor, but a bullet puts me down. If we fantasize, we can imagine a director’s megaphone flying into me from somewhere behind. It was said – I have to lie down in this scene. Let’s reshoot.

Roof, take two. The squad bursts in from the stairwell, and then some random sniper almost hits me – knocking over the flower that the actors had returned to the edge of the roof during the break. Everyone lies down on the floor, and I lie down too. We crawl to the opposite edge of the roof. My partner tells me, “Get the rocket launcher, we’ll shoot over there, see that window where the glass glinted?” And I can’t understand where that rocket launcher is – I forgot that they’ll add it in 3D later – and without thinking, I stand up again. “Why the hell did you stand up?” – the megaphone flies at me again.

Roof, take three. The invisible sniper demonstrates remarkable stubbornness and doesn’t want to kill me with the first shot, continuing to practice on the unfortunate flower. We crawl, talk to the necessary people, get what we need, shoot, kill. Take done, save point. And so it goes all the way.

The bot extras are very diligent in fulfilling their duties. Until some enemy doesn’t perform all the actions prescribed to him by the script (actually, it’s true, script is the same as the screenplay), you can’t stop him with a point-blank shot, multiple knife wounds, or even two grenades under his feet. The same is demanded from the gamer. If you have to eliminate those rebels on the towers first, and not the crowd rushing head-on, that very crowd will never end. The extras will escape from the frame and roll back the distance again, until either the main character finally blows off the heads of those who need it, or until the famous megaphone arrives.

In single player, the player is shown a movie. How much you will love the single player campaign of BF3 depends not on well-designed hot spots, but on how interesting it is for you to look around. You can miss another gloomy corridor behind a rocket beautifully crashing into a building, the fact that the player took off just by pressing a button and turning the camera behind a dynamic flight, or a massive night attack that doesn’t stand out from the crowd of competitors. In other words, don’t expect revolutionary gameplay from the single player campaign of Battlefield 3, but expect a beautiful dramatic picture, and everything will work out for you with the single player.

And then the multiplayer will start.