Battlefield 3: The Pinnacle of Boredom

When one stays away from a game for a long time the feelings one has towards it may soften or even fade away. This may lead one to wonder, "what was so bad or great about that game?" I was a teenager when I played Battlefield 3 and while I felt (and still feel) the multiplayer is a good time I remembered hating the single-player for BF3. But it had been almost 10 years since I last played through BF3's campaign and I could hardly remember why I hated it. On top of this I've been seeing people demand a remaster of this game, which made me feel like I had been too harsh towards this game seeing as how other folks obviously loved it. So after playing Fire Emblem 7, I decided to use BF3 as a palette cleanser. Taking the words of LateNightGaming into mind when talking about Call of Duty, "Think of it like being an actor in an action movie."

It didn't help and to understand why, it's best that I go through step by painful step.

Suffer with me.

Battlefield 3 starts off excitingly enough, under the skyline of New York City your character, clearly having a cuff in one hand, jumps onto a subway train and starts mowing down masked goons, clearly trying to stop some sort of bomb. And then it stops right when you reach the bomb, clearly intending to make the player ask who we're playing as and how we got here. Sadly this is the best part of the game because it immediately ruins everything by flashing back to 8 hours beforehand, where our mystery man, one Sergeant Blackburn, is being interrogated by two intelligence officers as he did... something. And tweedle dee and tweedle dumb want to know why Blackburn did the thing that's apparently bad. And with that the story actually begins.

So yes, Battlefield 3's story is a flashback, in a flashback. And it's the first flashback that serves as the narrative framing device with which the game's story (the second flashback) functions, spelling out every arduous detail of the plot between levels like the player is too stupid to comprehend what's going on before going back to the actual levels. This has the wonderful effect of creating a story telling dissonance, in which the characters focused on are not the character's we're supposed to be invested in. The game is a lot more focused on building the interrogators instead of Blackburn's comrades in arms. And trust me the story really suffers from that as all the soldiers you fight alongside just meld into this amorphous blob of blandness.

But right, the actual story, I should talk about that shouldn't I? Well it actually starts with Blackburn and his squad being called to investigate a missing squad in an Iraqi city. Which really consists of you being led down a linear set of corridors and occasionally shooting at some militia, called the PLR. And it's here where the game's biggest problems begin, the linearity. The entire game is just linear hallway gallery shooting and you are always, ALWAYS being led by the hand. Normally in a game like CoD or even Halo linearity isn't that big of an issue. In Battlefield? A series famously about big open maps and player-made set pieces? Kind of a big problem and it's worse than in games like Halo because Halo is more of a Sandbox and CoD at least makes things thrilling but Battlefield 3 can't do either right as you'll see going forward.

After a massive firefight an earthquake hits and the entire city is turned into a hot mess which is now owned by the PLR. So that sounds like a neat level idea, sneak through the ruined city and avoid the PLR at all costs? Nope, just another linear series of shootouts after one half hearted stealth sequence. Okay, well we found out that the PLR took over Iran... somehow. And the US has to invade Iran, presumably because this was written by war hawks for war hawks. Ya know when CoD4 did this same thing it at least had the decency to not name the country being invaded. Because by doing that I don't question the geopolitics that led to this and can treat it as "same shit, new day." However, invading Iran is, in both 2011 and 2021, kind of a big fucking deal so I need just a bit more explanation as to why the US would stick it's dick in that hornet's nest. But whatever, we get to fly a jet in this next level, which is always fun... right?

Nope, as it turns out we don't get to fly the damn jet, we get to ride in the back and click the fire button when the game tells us to. Frankly this is it, the point Battlefield 3 breaks you; if you make it past this level you can suffer through the rest of this mess. Because there's no lower point in this game than being told to sit in the backseat and click the fire button while characters you just met talk about things of little importance. This is, bar none, the worst level I've ever played in a video game. It's something everyone must experience at some point in their life because of how breathtakingly awful it is.

Now some would point out the AC-130 level in CoD 4 does something similar but in CoD 4 they at least gave you full control of the camera and forced you to aim, there was some modicum of challenge to it. And it was a break after an action packed level which was, ya know FUN. In BF3 the devs obviously gave up and stopped giving a fuck. This jet level makes Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blasters in Disneyland look like Halo. This level automatically makes me want to apologize for every rude thought I had about Battlefield 4 and Battlefield 1's campaigns, because those were trying. This jet level doesn't give a fuck and it hurts, so much. And the worst part? It's completely unnecessary. Yeah, the motive for this level is:

Tweedle Dumb: "You were supported by Lieutenant Hawkins..."

*One Level Later*

Blackburn: "I don't know her."

Tweedle Dee: "Okay, moving on."

That is no joke, how they justified a level that could have been entirely cut from this game with nothing lost except for my rising and boiling anger. Which, let me tell you how much I've come to hate this level since I played it. My PC can perform 4.2 million processes a second. If the word 'hate' was transmitted on each of those millions of processes it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for this level at this micro-instant. And these devs. Hate. HAAAAATE.

*one rage fueled blackout later*

Right, so Blackburn and his squad help invade Tehran in yet another dull linear shooting gallery and raid a bank vault to find the big bad, Al Assa- I mean Al Bashir. But because they needed to stretch this plot out however they don't find Al Bashir, but they do find a nuke in a bank vault. Which surprises them but doesn't shock me, how else do you keep burglars out than with thermonuclear warheads? What is concerning is that there seemed to be three nukes and now there's only one nuke AND a map pointing to Paris and New York. Don't need to be much of a detective to figure out what's going on with this plot, especially if you've seen any political thriller involving Russia or the Middle East.

The game thinks so as well so we flash forward to just 10 hours before this interrogation began, just in case you had a solid sense of how time flowed in this plot. We now follow a Russian agent named Dima as he and his team try to stop the nuke in Paris. And the game acts like this is supposed to be emotional, they have a Moment and one of them even dies but it's like, "I just met these guys, why do I care about them?" Made worse because the game insists they speak Russian all the time and I can't read subtitles while I'm being shot at in this freaking shooting gallery. But it doesn't really matter because Dima fails, the nuke goes off, and we go back to Blackburn. Who is now talking about the tank crew that came to extract them from Tehran leading us to a level that's actually somewhat fun.

Yes, unlike the jet level which inspires so much hatred, the tank level actually lets you DRIVE the tank. Meaning that for once in this game that has consisted of nothing but linear shooting gallery's with no set pieces to them there's an actual spark of life. Hallelujah... for like 5 minutes. And then they put you right back on rails because we can't have nice things I guess. But whatever it's all topped off by a pretty neat sequence in which our tank driver holds out against a horde of enemies but can't hold out forever, sacrificing yourself so the nuke can be extracted from the bank. And instead of dying our poor tank driver is captured and executed live on camera. Yeah, this game actually found some attempt to be a decent story... for 2 minutes; then it's onto the next level.

Alright this level is neat if not just for it's aesthetic, making your way with silent weapons in the neon city drenched with the night rain.... wait that's just Halo ODST. Oh well it's good anyway and this level is about on par with CoD's sniper missions so, not really bad just a bit dull. And it's here where we find out that Al Bashir was being manipulated by Zakhae- Solomon. And Solomon wants to destroy America because... because... ya know they never did say what Solomon wanted. I made the joke about Zakhaev but at least he had a motive of restoring the old Soviet Union and avenging his dead son. Solomon just exists because CoD 4 had a secret antagonist revealed in the third act and as I've shown this game is pretty shameless about what it's aping.

\Whatever, we're in the home stretch and ya know either I'm becoming more numb to the boredom or this game's is actually picking up a pulse as Blackburn's unit heads after a Russian arms dealer and the fighting here is actually big and wide open like some sort of Battlefield. But it doesn't last long as we wind up fighting off a jet with a stinger and two of our squad mates are killed. The game expects us to care but remember when I said the characters focused on are not the characters we're supposed to be invested in. Well I don't care about these two dead guys in spite of the whole game I just spent with them. Because the cutscenes never took the time to build an attachment with them because we were too busy with tweedle dee and tweedle dumb as our plot framing device as opposed to, ya know, a normal plot flow that just had the subway mission and then flashing back to the first level with no interrogation shit in between. Nor do I care about the tension between one of our squadmates, Montes, and our CO, Captain Cole that was only hinted at in throwaway dialogue in the night sniper level.

But we barely get time to think about that as we're back to Dima who showed up at the same time Blackburn but reached the arms dealer first after an actually decent level with a decent opening, even if the parachute scene tanked my framerate like crazy on a GTX 1080 at 1080p which is not great. So Dima and Blackburn meet and Dima tells Blackburn to head for New York while he heads for Paris and Blackburn does so, shooting his CO to buy Dima time. Which again, don't really care much that Blackburn shot his CO, which should be a bigger thing but nah, he's in our way and he's a prick.

And finally, FINALLY, we're back to where we began, with Montes being bought into the interrogation room but helping Blackburn escape and reach the subway where the game started. The level reaches the point where it cut off initially and after another linear hallway sequence in the New York sewer, Blackburn stops Solomon, disarms the nuke, and saves NYC. After one last QTE which, might I mention, this game is full of and I hate them. I mean it's not in the jet level but I already HATE the jet level so that doesn't mean much to allievate my struggling. What does alleviate my struggling however is the credits, which thankfully come right after this and a cutscene involving Dima but I checked out mentally after realizing the game was over.

Okay fine, it's not over yet, there's still multiplayer; but like I said at the start of all this mess the multiplayer is fine, even if Battlefield 4's overshadowed it. And honestly for a game from 2011 Battlefield 3 still looks really good, the lighting is beautiful and the facial animations are pretty good. It's just the campaign redefines the term pain and is the worst of the "linear hallway" genre of FPS. Also unlike multiplayer the campaign technically jank too, there was the frame-rate drop in that parachute scene but also the game hitches at every checkpoint and in the Tehran level my objectives got messed up and the game didn't think I cleared a certain point in the level.

Overall, if you want a good multiplayer game, maybe skip to Battlefield 4, but if you want to experience the absolute worst single player FPS of all time, play Battlefield 3, you'll have your brain seeping out of your skull from all the boredom. That said the stuff with Dima had the potential to be good but it's underbaked and out of order, I'd much rather follow his story than Blackburn. But if DICE were to remake BF3 I'd recommend just re-doing the campaign from scratch because there's not enough to salvage from this mess of a story, multiplayer is still a bop. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to Fire Emblem because I still need to beat FE6.

PS: If you want BF3 but good, play CoD 4.