Battlefield 3’s best online battles favor organized, team-based play. Soldiers are encouraged to stay on task, help their teammates, and stick together. And for doing so, they’re rewarded with a tantalizing series of upgrades to their weapons, rank, and gadgets. Subtle play tweaks, such as the ability to go prone, may favor snipers in the long run—especially those who take advantage of glitches and are able to hide parts of their bodies in walls and rocks. But for now, the change seems to encourage smart play. Those who don’t want to get shot don’t charge into the open.
The game’s launch was marred by crowded servers and a matchmaking system that fails more than it connects. Wisely, Battlefield 3 offers an option to browse servers manually, allowing players to queue for games that are less likely to fill up. Its hard to shake the sense that in the rush to beat Modern Warfare 3 to store shelves, Battlefield 3 came out of the oven a little undercooked.
Particularly gooey is the single-player campaign—a thin, linear, trite (even by military-shooter standards) thriller that imagines a plot by rogue Russian and Iranian terrorists to nuke Paris and New York. A lousy framing device means that much of the plot is told by way of lame interrogation. And much of the action takes place in Iran after an earthquake—which feels like a cheap shortcut around delivering a vivid recreation of Tehran. Of course, all nitpicks around Battlefield 3’s single-player content are just that. Online, where it counts for games of this ilk, Battlefield 3 is big, taut, and hard to walk away from. Unless, that is, you prefer the slightly different flavor of Modern Warfare.
