Why did DICE bother making this campaign?

I just switched off Battlefield 3‘s campaign, and it’s the last time I’ll ever play it. No, I didn’t beat it, nor did I finish a 100 percent achievement run. I turned it off because I believe it’s one of the most unoriginal, cheapest, tacked-on campaigns I’ve played. It deserves no more of my attention at all, whatsoever, when I have about six games that eclipse it in greatness sitting on my shelf next to it.

I didn’t think I would dislike it this much, as it’s my first time playing a Battlefield game. I always knew the games had a heavy multiplayer component and fan base, but being the single-player champion that I am, I wanted to give its campaign a shot.

Originally, when I put it in for the first time, I was immediately blown away.

When this happens with a game, I always hear Yahtzee Croshaw’s voice in the back of my mind saying that it’s OK to assume a bad game won’t get better, but also remember a good game might not always stay good. If I had a dime for every time I played a game that started great and went downhill, I’d have a few dollars in my wallet.

Battlefield 3 is no different.

First things first, though — I was totally onboard from the second, literally the second, I turned on the game. The title screen was engaging and the menus were very slickly designed. I’m not always one to critique, or even pay attention to, a freaking menu of all things, but it’s all part of the package, after all. I give Battlefield‘s menus and title screen a hearty thumbs up.

When I pressed the Start New Campaign option, I was immediately immersed. The game cuts frames in of a train running on tracks with spliced in black frames that feature EA and DICE’s logos. It was all well put together, and it flowed with a sense of urgency. You see through the eyes of an unknown character as he runs down a street toward the side of a bridge. It’s nighttime with an urban backdrop.

“It’s not a brown desert…” I thought, pleased with the setting.

The character then vaults over the side of the bridge and lands on the moving train.

“This is just like Mirror’s Edge!” I thought, not expecting to see any trace of a previous DICE title here.

That small dose of Mirror’s Edge kicked my interest in the game up a bit. I certainly wasn’t expecting any of Battlefield to transform into a primary-colored parkour playground, but the similarity in that sequence alone gave me hope.

As I paced through the train, blowing enemies away with a Beretta I picked up off a dead body, I kept noticing how great everything looked. DICE sure wasn’t fucking around with visuals.

After the subway shootout, which concluded with a cliffhanger, I was flashbacked to what the meat of Battlefield consists of — military shooter in a desert landscape. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I kept playing. I mean, really, I didn’t expect the entire game to be in an urban setting.

In the next level, things heated up again.

There’s a section where you’re walking up a flight of stairs in an unstable middle eastern building with squadmates, and the lights keep flickering. You’re not exactly sure what’s at the top, and gunfire is rattling outside the thin walls around you. I encountered a sense of fear that I don’t normally get in military shooters. Battlefield was doing something right. I think the visuals and the excellent sound design helped fuel my dread during the sequence.

As I pressed on, the game got less interesting. It became a follow-the-leader simulator with almost every waypoint being “follow” or “move” after someone in your squad. It contrasted heavily with the dark, redemptive, lone wolf opening. And it was for the worst.

This is what Battlefield 3 became to me: some interesting moments wedged into boring missions.

I never felt like an important piece in moving the nearly incomprehensible story along, either. Whenever all you’re doing is following orders and following your teammates, as you control an entire roster of different, nonspeaking people, it’s hard to feel important.

What baffled me most was the intense contrast between the main protagonist, Blackburn, in the prerendered cutscenes and Blackburn in the missions.

The story is a cliched interrogation sequence where as you tell your higher ups what happens in overarching, between-mission cutscenes, you play through Blackburn’s explanations as the missions. Every once in a while, you play as someone else who has a side role in the plot. I suspect these sections are here to pad out gameplay because they consist mostly of terrible, boring turret sections or tank driving missions. They drag on forever and serve nearly no purpose to gameplay or story, other than feeling like slightly playable cutscenes.

Anyway, when Blackburn is being interrogated in the well-directed, prerendered cutscenes, he is active, argumentative and has an attitude. When you play through his eyes in his multiple missions, he never utters a word. The least DICE could’ve done was baste some of that personality over from the cutscenes to the gameplay. That at least would’ve made his attachment to the numerous soldiers he fights alongside more engaging. As it stands, there is no attachment, and I realized this during a sequence where a few soldiers die around you. The game action pauses as a friend mourns over them. I didn’t realize I was supposed to remember, much less care about, the people who died.

“Boo hoo,” I mocked. “Let’s get on with it.”

Battlefield also has the problem where it chases after realism so hard that it’s completely unfair. I’m not opposed to having a character who dies after getting shot about four times. Rainbow Six: Vegas is one of my favorite shooters, after all. I am, however, opposed to enemies who are unreasonably accurate shots at all ranges with every weapon and who know exactly where you’re standing behind breakable walls when they fire through them. And I could do without enemies that are designed to look bafflingly similar to your AI-controlled teammates.

Put the fragile player-controlled character together with the ultra-accurate enemies, teammates who I swear picked up blanks off the truck instead of live rounds and a busted checkpoint system that places you multiple minutes back most times you die and perhaps you will understand why I have no intention of turning it back on.

What hurts more than anything is that this garbage campaign comes from the same people who developed one of my favorite games of all time — Mirror’s Edge (which also had cheap moments in its campaign, I’ll admit).

I felt like DICE lead me on during sections of the campaign, too.

The visual design is strikingly similar to Mirror’s Edge in some parts, including a lengthy indoor shootout when you play as a bad guy. Well designed offices are washed out and punctuated with bright, primary colored walls and pillars. Even the desert scenes are more white and blue than brown.

There are also vaults that seem like they’re ripped straight out of Faith’s (runner) bag of moves. I didn’t mind.

It’s like people on the Battlefield team also wanted to make another Mirror’s Edge instead of the umpteenth multiplayer-focused military shooter and they pulled every string they could to get those similar details in there.

If nothing else, I appreciated them.

What kept me playing past the aforementioned office level was the hope that more Mirror’s Edge design aesthetic would pop up. Save for some vaultable objects here and an overall washed-out palette, nothing else caught my eye.

For what it’s worth, the least Battlefield did was give me a few intense moments here and there surrounded by a thick fat of monotonous shooting gallery sections.

At least now I know what the next Mirror’s Edge will look like.

For those of you wondering exactly what sent me over the edge, and made me stop playing:

I was at the end of one corridor with enemies spawning continually from a door in the back. Once it was cleared, no thanks to my teammates, I proceeded to a shooting range where real enemies popped up alongside paper ones. I died twice in here due to the enemies’ laser sights always landing, with pinpoint accuracy, in both my character’s eyes at the same time, ergo blocking his vision. Both times I died, I had to fight through the long corridor of enemies because, in a move of pure and simple bad design, a checkpoint wasn’t placed just before the shooting range area, even though there’s a significant break in action before it.

My third time through the range, I slowly and carefully cleared all the enemies out. As I breathed a sigh of relief, I turned to my left just in time for an enemy to rush through the door at me.

In Battlefield 3, every time an enemy comes within a five-foot radius of you, an unstoppable sequence happens where the enemy pulls a knife and stabs you once, causing you to die immediately. There’s no way to counter this move, even though most player-controlled characters have a quick-time-event-laced hand-to-hand fight with an enemy at scripted points. This unbreakable stab happened at the very end of the range scene, and I spawned, after a loading screen, back to the beginning of the long corridor of endless enemies.

“Fuck this game.” I said and turned it off. If it weren’t for my boyfriend wanting to play online multiplayer I probably would’ve destroyed the disc.

All photos from Battlefield.com