I anticipate hate mail, given that I'm probably offering the worse review on the entire Internets regarding this game. I'm sorry. Really, I am. But I don't play video games to piss away my life running around shooting other online players with absolutely no outcome other than a general sense of self-worth upon “winning.”
I play games for the stories. I play games to live inside a fictional world on a level that I can't get from a book (but of course I love books, too!). I want to experience a story.
Which is why I couldn't sit through this game. The story is an old rehash of just about every war game cliché you can think of, to say nothing of the interrogation sequence that feels incredibly familiar (cough, Black Ops, cough). Nothing about it interested me, and in full disclosure I didn't spend much time with the first two games so maybe playing those first would have lowered my expectations.
“But every first-person war game is like that,” you persist. No, my fellow gamer, they aren't. You can have complex characters. You can have a good story.
Or, apparently, you can have multiplayer. I won't ramble much more, because multiplayer may be your “thing,” and I don't want to insult you. If you enjoy multiplayer, tack on another two points to the review score. But I don't like multiplayer (I think that's obvious at this point). I crave story, plain and simple. And every minute I try to play multiplayer is another minute I've stolen from my short life that could have been spent enjoying another story. Why am I talking in “minutes,” anyway? It would take me at least a hundred hours to reach a level of acceptable killability that I could participate in a multiplayer match without being wiped out regularly, and at that point the next first-person shooter will have come out.
Maybe that's the point. Maybe multiplayer is the new opiate of the masses. Maybe what we have in our society now is an entire subsection of people grouped off and isolated, moving from multiplayer map to multiplayer map and never experiencing the wonders of the world. Maybe not.
What Battlefield does have are amazing graphics and amazing sound. You'll be impressed, and maybe you'll be able to play through the campaign simply by focusing on the shiny metal armor. But, like all the other dreadful first-person shooters that have come out this year, I just couldn't stay interested.
