Battlefield 3

Finally the long awaited Battlefield 3 has arrived! I started playing Battlefield when Battlefield: Bad Company 2 came out. A lot of hardcore Battlefield fans might say ‘no!’ to me but even though the campaign wasn’t that great the multiplayer was were that game shined. I don’t care what people say, Bad Company 2’s multiplayer was damn good and it was damn fun. I don’t care if it didn’t have jets in it, it was my first Battlefield game and it was epic. Anyway, this isn’t about Bad Company 2. I guess what I’m trying to say is that this game is an improvement to its previous games, I know I should be comparing this to Battlefield 2 more than Bad Company 2 but unfortunately I never played it. I know there are slight differences between console and PC versions of the game, for this review I will be talking about the Xbox 360 version. Again the hardcore Battlefield along with the PC community will be going crazy at me and may not even take this review seriously but it’s the platform that I play most of my games on. I did try to get the beta working on my PC. I recently upgraded my PC because my old one couldn’t run anything but sadly for some reason even after I downloaded the driver it told me to download it wouldn’t let me join a match. I would just sit there staring at a spinning circle on Battlelog.

One main thing about Battlefield that everyone loves is the graphics. I thought the graphics were really good in Bad Company 2 and when I heard they were stepping up their engine to Frostbite 2 I was really excited. I play Battlefield 3 on the console so obviously the graphics aren’t going to be superior, if you play console you’re just going to have to accept that and if you don’t you’re stupid. This is coming from a console gamer so don’t get too offended. Coming up to the release I was a little bit scared how the game would look and run on the Xbox 360. I heard a lot of crap from mostly PC elitists who have nothing better to do than to insult console gamers. I’ve played the game for almost 24 hours and I can safely say that you don’t have to listen to anyone who says this game plays terribly on console because it doesn’t. It simply doesn’t. I only ever found one recurring problem and I doubt it happened on PC was that there was sometimes a huge drop in frames per second during the single player. This only happened maybe four or five times throughout the roughly seven hour campaign. During multiplayer the only problems I have encountered was server lag and quick match problems, each of them I only encountered maybe around three times which is a lot less than what everyone else is complaining about.

The singleplayer is pretty awesome. I’ve only played this and Bad Company 2 and the Bad Company 2 campaign wasn’t that great so I didn’t have much to compare it to. I don’t want to compare it too much to Call of Duty because they really are different games and you’ll understand that more if you play a lot of video games. I installed the HD texture pack straight away so I haven’t don’t a comparison but I have seen one and there is a difference. There’s a difference in the small detail of things but there isn’t in the big picture if that makes sense. I would say, don’t play this game without the texture pack. There isn’t any reason not too and it does make a difference. It’s the small things that make a difference! Call of Duty campaigns rarely disappoint. I’ve played since World at War and I have played the COD4 campaign and I haven’t been disappointed by one yet. I’ve heard that the singleplayer of Battlefield 3 was just an excuse to show off the graphics. Even if it was they’ve done a good job. The dark knight in the city alone was really eerie. The whole singleplayer had a great atmosphere around it the whole time. Right at the beginning they make sure you see the handcuffs around your wrists which I thought was pretty cool once I got to the end of the singleplayer. My favourite mission was when you were playing as the Russians in Paris. That mission was really colourful and I really liked the gun I was given.

Now down to the multiplayer. This is what everyone is excited about and rightly so. Bad Company 2’s multiplayer was a lot of fun but it definitely wasn’t perfect. No game is ever going to be perfect but this one is amazing. One of my favourite things about this game is the animation of the characters. When you think about it, it’s a small thing but now I realise how huge and important it is. The animation of the Engineer reloading an RPG, Gustav or AT4 in Bad Company was god awful. In Battlefield 3 the animations are so smooth. The running animation is so realistic I find myself staring at other people in the game rather than doing anything. Of course, the thing that everyone loves in Battlefield are the jets. I’m just going to be honest here, I suck major nut sack at the jets. I can fly them but I fail sometimes and crash but most of the time I just can’t shoot anything else done with my god damn gun! 300 points doesn’t seem that much when you look at the little progress bar but the odds are against you when you are flying against a pilot who has flares, heat seeking missiles, the fancy map thing that I don’t know the name of. I got this game on the 31st of October. I preordered it so I have the limited edition with the code for the Back to Karkand DLC. I live in Europe so I had to wait a couple more days to get it. By the time I got it loads of people were already flying around with all this jet gear that I’m probably not going to get till Battlefield 4! Personally I shine on the ground with a gun in my hands, that’s the player I am.

The multiplayer is amazing but it isn’t perfect. I find myself getting spawn killed a lot, and when I say a lot I mean a lot. It could just be my fault and I’m sure some of them are but it just seems like it happens way too much. I could be really stupid and not realise that people are in combat and I shouldn’t spawn on them. They have taken spawn invincibility out of the game which I guess I’m happy about. In Bad Company 2 it was such a bitch and it would always cost me a kill. That is probably the only criticism of the multiplayer. I like the idea of the degrading vehicles. I don’t like the idea of vehicles regenerating health but when I heard what DICE said about it I felt better, to keep vehicles in the game and make them more of a core part of combat. It seems like they have taken out of decreased at least the recharge of the defibulators. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing in terms of gameplay but I like it. One thing I really praise DICE for doing is increasing the amount of points for capturing or destroying an M-COM. This really helps people actually go for the objective. I still get frustrated when nobody does it but it feels like more people are trying harder to get to the objective.

For some reason I can’t get into Battlelog and check out my stats. I’ll keep trying and get back to you if I can.

This game definitely has a lot of play time in it, much more than Bad Company 2. I will be playing this game a lot and I’m really looking forward to the DLC. This game is really awesome and there is no reason why you should be on the fence about buying this game.

I still rage in the multiplayer but I give it the double thumbs up, 9/10

By the way, I did a MW3 wish list a while back and I didn’t do one for Battlefield 3. The reason for that is because I wasn’t worried that this game was going to be a disappointment.

Battlefield 3 Open Beta!

As you can probably work out from the title what this is going to be about, the beta for Battlefield 3 was released to the whole world of gamers today! As soon as I got home I started the download and waited patiently. I started downloading it for the Xbox and I know a lot of the Battlefield and PC elitists will be screaming right now. I pre-ordered it for the Xbox but I am having second thoughts and may cancel it. Still haven’t made a decision yet. I’m still currently downloading the PC beta but it is taking ages and is locked on 89.95%. I’m having second thoughts because I recently upgraded my PC because my old one was a hunk o’ crap. I didn’t upgrade to a ‘beastly’ machine but apparently I can run, not on ultra high settings though. That’s why I’m getting the beta on PC too so I can compare and see if it’s worth it.

Maybe it’s just me but Origin has basically been dead, I can only assume because of the masses of people trying to download it. Anyway, lets get to the good bit, the game. On the console you can play the Paris Metro map on Rush. I think on the PC you can play Conquest on Caspian Border but I haven’t played the PC version yet so everything that I’ll be talking about here will be from my experiences of maybe an hour playing on the 360. The game looks great, I know a lot of console players like me have been kind of worried that the console version will lose out on the best parts of the game. Obviously the PC graphics are better but it still looks nice, similar to Bad Company 2 but cleaner, the lighting effects in this game are amazing. There seems to be a lot of recoil on the guns, I don’t think it’s a bad thing, it feels more realistic and it’ll force people to burst fire and shoot a gun properly for once. I’m fed up of seeing Ken Burton holding down the trigger in another one of his videos (I still like Ken as a commentator). The map is very cool. It has open colourful areas then contrasts to a linear dark passage. The destroyed metro station is a great place for a fire fight. The M-COM stations are in great places, great places to defend yet not too good so the attackers can destroy the defenders.

I may post another article on Caspian Border and my eventual decision on which one to pre-order. If you haven’t downloaded the beta, go do it now.

Battlefield over Call of Duty

I haven’t posted anything in a while so I thought I’d talk about something that is kind of important in games right now and will be later on this year. Lately I’ve been a lot more interested in Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I bought the game when it first came out and I immediately fell in love, I played a lot of COD near the end of MW2 and pretty much played COD over Battlefield most of the time, only going back for a game or two. Now I’m back in and really excited for Battlefield 3 and not so excited for MW3.

For me it’s the gameplay, I do enjoy arena games like Halo and COD but I love the open battlefields and realistic gameplay that is showcased in Battlefield. I understand that games like COD may take more gun skill to drop opponents and complete objectives but in Battlefield you have to work together, I mean it’s like real war! You have to revive to keep ticket numbers up, give ammo, spot people etc. There are a lot of games that I want for example, L.A. Noire, Portal 2 and games that haven’t come out yet like Skyrim but I haven’t been feeling the same way about MW3. The engine has hardly been upgraded since COD4 and I’m not a graphics whore! But seriously, the Frostbite engine has was upgraded from Bad Company 1 to Bad Company 2 and now they are upgrading it again! That shows that DICE aren’t looking for a game to crap out every year whether it’s ready or not, they want to take their sweet time making a quality game. Who knows, with Sledgehammer helping Infinity Ward on the campaign and Raven Software takes care of the multiplayer, we could see a great experience in online gaming, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up.

I know it sounds like I’m crapping on the Call of Duty franchise which I am and not very subtly but I do love Call of Duty no matter how much it angers me sometimes. In fact I am getting into it a little more thanks to Machinima Respawn posting competitive gamebattle matches and the Call of Community which just passed really got my hyped up to play Call of Duty.

I’m not sure if I’ll get MW3 but I’m not going to say no straight away. I know if something sells why stop selling it but I hope Activision one day see that enough is enough and do something about the franchise.

MW3 Wishlist

My first Call of Duty game was World at War so I started when COD still ran with basic 3, 5 and 7 killstreaks. When MW2 if you sucked nut sack you were left watching kill cams over and over and over again. I wasn’t that great on World at War, I had mixed results in MW2 and I only started to get mostly consistent scores in Black Ops. MW2 was the beginning of the killstreaks, Infinity Ward finally released the potential of the real gamers in the community by allowing them to get killstreaks up to 25 kills. I was very inconsistent in MW2 so I pretty much ran the whole time with 3, 5 and 7. When Black Ops came out the made it so you couldn’t unlock killstreaks with other killstreaks e.g. you couldn’t use your Predator Missile to get a double and unlock your Harrier Strike. Personally I really like the new system, you can only unlock killstreaks with your gun, grenades, melee and equipment. It’s a lot more fair and it doesn’t create ridiculous amounts of death and destruction.

Black Ops might be the most balanced Call of Duty so far but it does have its slight problems. The randomised scoped shots with a sniper is extremely annoying and I don’t even quick scope. If you don’t know what that is, Treyarch made it so for a small amount of time when you first scope in your shot could go anywhere in the hip fire sights to bypass quick scoping. In my opinion they’ve made it more unrealistic. One thing that everyone hates, except for the douches who do this is, stacking up RC-XDs then spamming them, one after the other. I recently had a match where I got killed by the same guy with both his RC-XDs in a row. You’re pretty much guaranteed to get a kill with an RC-XD, maybe 80-90% of the time. Everyone has the period where you use RC-XDs and I pretty much got a kill with nearly every RC-XD  I had. Obviously I came to my senses and put 8, 9 and 11 on. I hate RC-XDs and I know people are going to use them, especially low level players but it really annoys me when a prestige 15 player stacks up remote controlled cars filled with explosives and obliterates me on an 8 killstreak. With Hardline all a noob needs to do is get 2 kills! 2 kills! And for bad player who most likely isn’t getting high killstreaks and dying a lot is going to stack up loads of them and just mess the other team up!

Treyarch have done a pretty good job at making the game balanced and fair but if you can spam something so much it makes the player consider stopping playing the game then there is a serious problem. Make RC-XDs like a 5 killstreak or something! At least the stacking will stop a little bit. All I wish for in MW3 is that they keep the balanced game and increase the amount of killstreaks, if I’m having a good day I’ll get blackbird, chopper and dogs in most of my matches. I don’t usually go higher than a 15 killstreak but it would be nice to have the option. I hope Infinity Ward don’t go over the top with the killstreaks like in MW2, not only do they need to keep gun damage balanced but they need to keep the killstreaks balanced, in MW2 you could have Harriers and Pave Low absolutely raping everyone on the server. Another huge thing I would like to see is killstreaks only by weapons etc. If not it’s going to be death and destruction and that can be fun but not when it goes over the top. Keeping the COD currency would be nice, that was widely accepted in Black Ops and I would be pretty pissed off if it were to disappear. More guns would always be nice, especially submachine guns. Maybe it’s just me but most of the subs in Black Ops aren’t that great, the best are probably, AK47u, Mac 11, MPL, PM63 and the Kiparis, there are other good ones but those ones are the ones that are the most consistent for me.

Battlefield 3 will most likely blow MW3 out of the water because all CODs are the same even if MW3 learns from past mistakes. As long as they keep it balanced and fair and try not to underestimate killstreaks to avoid stacking and spamming then it’ll be a better version of the same game they’ve been making for the past 10 years or so.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

A lot of gamers whether hardcore or just recreational gamers will say that COD 4 is one game that you must play. I first played the COD 4 campaign a couple of weeks ago and it turned out to be my second favourite COD campaign, Black Ops being my favourite. It just felt so much more realistic.

Obviously I was a little confused at some parts of MW2 because I had never played the first Modern Warfare but this one filled in all the pieces. I managed to knock out the whole campaign in one sitting in an afternoon, determined to get it finished. Whilst playing I encountered the best Call of Duty mission I have ever played, sniping with Captain MacMillan. MW2 was epic, I loved the airport massacre mission just as much as the next guy and I love Ghost and the rest of the characters but the overall atmosphere of COD 4 captured me.

As soon as I completed the campaign I hopped over to multiplayer and had pretty good results. My friend previously mentioned that the snipers were immense, just like the rest of the community. I’m not a Call of Duty sniper, I can only snipe on Battlefield, so having good scores with a sniper in Call of Duty was a big deal for me. My best scores were with the MP5 and the M4 Carbine.

At first I was surprised that I hadn’t come across any hacking, turns out I just had to play the game a little more. Pretty much as soon as I came across the first floating enemy I took the game out of the disc tray, not only floating enemies but people advertising their COD hacking websites at the side of the screen.

Finally I can see why most fans still think COD 4 is still one of the best Call of Duty games

Team based or lone wolf?

I enjoy a good game of Call of Duty but I also enjoy a game of Battlefield or Halo. I enjoy these games for different reasons and everyone will have a different opinion. Call of Duty, even if you’re playing a team game, is a lone wolf game. Even in Team Deathmatch or Team Slayer, everyone is competing for the kills. The fact that there’s a kill limit really increases the competition. In Battlefield the games aren’t necessarily based on kills as it is a class based game. The multiplayer is split up into different classes that are meant to perform different tasks to benefit the team. By introducing tasks that don’t involve killing, the game turns into something a bit more sophisticated. By not even showing the amount of kills, assists, deaths and kill death ratio, it changes how the game is looked upon even more.

Halo may have games like Team Slayer and Lone Wolf game modes but there are more team based games that are actually team based. Doubles requires a lot of team work to effectively eliminate the other two enemies. In Halo: Reach, with the introduction to jet packs, sprint, evade, active camo and armour lock it creates even more team work, different people who are good at different things need to choose the best load out to achieve their goal. A sniper might choose a jet pack to get to high places or active camo. A player who likes to rush might choose sprint or evade or even armour lock. Halo and Battlefield and other games like Homefront (a game that I have no intention of playing) all have vehicles, something that Call of Duty STILL lacks in it’s gameplay. The use of vehicles creates a sense of team play, especially in Battlefield, one player in charge of something, the other in charge of another thing. Personally the best game that has mastered both of these things is Halo, it has the team work part in some game types and has other game types that suit solitary players but in the end I would take a game that takes team work and communication, like Battlefield, over Call of Duty. It forces you to communicate with other players and actually use a strategy and use your skills to complete the objective. I would love it if games started to meander to the team work side of gameplay but there will always be games like Call of Duty that live on, I can only dream that a team based game will be the next COD killer.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

I bought this game when it came out and I loved it. Me and my friends would role in a squad raping everyone. We had plans for world domination, we would all have our class that we played as, it was very organised and it worked well. The game is extremely different from COD and if you like first person shooters and you’re getting bored of COD this is a great change. Eventually my friend persuaded me to come back to Modern Warefare 2 because he didn’t like it.

Admittedly, the single player isn’t as good. The storyline lacks the imagination of the Call of Duty series but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. The game itself looks amazing, the landscapes are beautiful. The single player might not be as good as other FPS games but there are definitely parts of the game that you won’t find in any other FPS. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 makes up for the single player with it’s multiplayer. The multiplayer is by far the best online experience I have ever encountered. Sure in Call of Duty there are loads of options and game types but you won’t find the maps, and the cooperation of the players in this game. The game doesn’t focus on kills and deaths, more so on points gathered. I enjoy games like this because you don’t get so frustrated when you die or become a different player when you’re on a massive killstreak. Instead of building up kills you are encouraged to gain points by either repairing vehicles, destroying vehicles, planting bombs, defusing bombs, healing, reviving, giving people ammo etc.

This brings me on to the classes. The multiplayer is divided into four different classes, Assault, Engineer, Medic and Recon. As an Assault your goal is to rush into the battlefield and kill. Killing isn’t everything, dropping ammo packs will also give you points, when another player is low on ammo they can resupply by walking over it. As you may have guessed, you can only use assault rifles as an Assault. As an Enginerr your job is to drive the vehicles. The vehicles being, tanks, quad bikes and helicopters. As a Engineer you can have a gadget, a drill that allows you to repair vehicles and this also gives you points. You can only use sub machine guns as an Engineer. As the Medic, your objective is to heal and revive. Healing works in the exact same way as resupplying as an Assault. Reviving brings people back from the brink of death and can potentially give you a lot of points. The Medic can only use light machine guns. I usually hate LMGs but they are really good in this game. As the Recon you are supposed to take people out to aid your fellow players on the battlefield. In my opinion there are only three good snipers in this game. They are all bolt action, the others have horrible sights and are semi automatic, one is full automatic. As a Recon you can call in mortar strikes and throw motion mines which help your team mates. Sniping in this game is insane. The sniping in this game is like no other. It’s not like in Call of Duty where the snipers are basically used like M14s. You actually have to snipe, you have to think as a sniper and when you get that kill from across the map, it is extremely rewarding.

Another thing that puts this game above others is the use of vehicles. You can drive a range of tanks, helicopters, quad bikes, boats, jet skis and humvees. The vehicles like tanks and helicopters can dominate if put in the right hands but if you aren’t an experienced pilot of gunner you are not going to last in a vehicle. Experience does play a key role when lethal vehicles are involved. Another great thing in this game is the UAVs. Instead of just calling one in, you use a stationary computer to fly it around, call in Hellfire strikes and shoot enemies if you have the right specs.

This game is severely underrated in my opinion and a lot of games are taking credit for things that Battlefield: Bad Company 2 have brought into the gaming world. Homefront for instance the Parrot Drone is pretty much the UAV in Bad Company 2. There is also a version of Conquest and Rush mixed into one game type in Homefront. I don’t know the name because I have no intention of playing Homefront, I haven’t heard great things about it even though I was excited for its release. Conquest in Bad Company 2 is when you capture flags and Rush is when you destroy things called ‘M-COM’ stations and move up the map when two are destroyed and repeat. Homefront act as if these things are new but they aren’t and now Homefront are taking credit for it when Bad Company 2 have already done it.

I have recently started playing this game again and I am loving it. Battlefield 3 is coming out and I am very excited for its release. The online can only get better.