Battlefield 3 review

Massive 64-player maps. Fully destructible scenery. Class-based combat that encourages team play. Battlefield 3 brings back everything that made previous games so successful, but upping the scale to create a game that feels bigger and better than ever before. With a huge choice of land, sea and air-based vehicles, you don’t need to worry if you aren’t adept with a rifle or rocket launcher – effective pilots can be just as pivotal to turning the tide of battle as an infantry squad. Aerial battles are incredibly thrilling, but require serious practice to stay airborne long enough to shoot down some enemy bandits.

You need to install EA’s Origin service to run the game, but you’ll spend most of your time in BattleLog – the web-based interface tracks your stats, keeps you in touch with your friends and lets you search for game servers to join. Like most new multiplayer shooters, persistent unlocks and statistics are the order of the day. Each class has its own unlock tree, as does each vehicle and weapon. You’ll need to invest some serious play time to unlock everything, as you only earn experience for a particular piece of equipment when you use it.

As always, the game is best played with friends – you need to work together as a unit to survive, with a medic to resurrect fallen comrades and an engineer to repair vehicles. You can respawn on your squad if you die, so you won’t have to trek back to the front-line as long as one member can stay alive long enough. Piloting a Black Hawk helicopter into enemy territory with three of your friends in the back is an experience that few other games can hope to challenge.

If you aren’t going to take it online, there’s little here that hasn’t been done before. Outstanding graphics aside, the single player campaign feels generic and has none of the hallmarks of a Battlefield game. However, Battlefield 3 offers some of the best multiplayer gameplay it’s possible to have on the PC – it isn’t as immediate as Call of Duty, but if you’ve got the time and the right group of friends, there are few other games that are as tightly crafted as this.