Battlefield 3 PC Review!

I've been putting off this review for a while. Battlefield 3 is one of the biggest titles to come out for the PC in a while, and it is expected to make huge cash with loads of sales. A lot of thought goes into the writing of topics brought up in a review. But in the end, what most people really care about is what the final word is. Does the reviewer suggest playing the game? Does the reviewer suggest buying the game? A lot of the time the question of why doesn't matter because if you play it you find out for yourself why it was a good game to buy. This is why negative reviews tend to be very popular. If a game isn't a suggested purchase, people want to know why. If they don't get to play to find out for themselves, then they want to know why they were steered away from a game. In the end the two biggest questions a reader probably has when looking at a review is, do I suggest you play / buy game x? Things get complicated though when the answer isn't clear, or when it lies somewhere in between. Battlefield 3 is one of those complicated titles. So should you buy it? Well...

Ok, so I'm not going to tell you until the end what that most important answer is, but try to resist skipping ahead to the final word. The verdict on this title requires a lot of explanation, because the verdict comes with different reasons than usual. This game doesn't come down to gameplay, graphics, and execution. There is more going on here that will impact the decision. There really is more to a game than just being in the game playing. Please read through fully before calling my conclusion bonkers, or bullshit.

So let's first get the basics out of the way. The game engine is pretty good. Everything looks quite nice, and the lighting that everyone raves about is probably deserving of some major credit. The gameplay is very solid, and the sounds compliment everything very nicely. A lot of people have said that it's not much more than a revamped version of Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I admit that there are a lot of very striking similarities between the two games. The feel is much the same. The style of play is much the same, and the whole layout and play of the game will make you feel a lot like the step from Bad Company 2 wasn't very large. However, once you are in the game for a while you start to notice that there are subtleties to the game play. Little things that, on their own, don't seem like much but when put together do leave this game as a solid stand a lone entity apart from Bad Company 2. I'm not a big fan of $60 plus tax for any new game, but I would say the value aspect isn't any worse than many of the other big name titles out lately. I'm still not happy about the general move from $49.99 to $59.99, but that is another article.

All of these things about any Battlefield game should be a given. It has a lot of manpower and money behind it, and it is expected to pull in some large truckloads of cash, so technical quality should be a given. Yes, so far it lives up to all these expectations. If the game was all I expected it to be, and hoped it would be, this article would have a VERY different tone than it is about to take. Like it or not people expect certain things out of a Battlefield game. It may or may not be fair to expect these things, but they do impact what people think about their purchase. This is where Battlefield 3 begins to muddle things up a bit. A lot of the expectations I had weren't met. I can accept that maybe I don't represent the core demographic for the game ( to be honest I'm not what you would call a HARDCORE Battlefield fan, but I am a gaming fan, and I do appreciate a good warfare based FPS game ), but I noticed even the hardcore Battlefield fans up in arms about a bunch of things that were going on up to and after release.

Next->