Battlefield 4 (PC)
When it comes to evaluating any title in the Battlefield franchise, it's important to remember that the only reason anyone plays campaign mode is to unlock new weapons in multiplayer. Despite great voice acting by Michael K. Williams (Omar from The Wire), campaign mode is little more than a four to six hour tutorial teaching you how to play the game. It is frustratingly on-rails, and gameplay is literally "move here and shoot this." The story involves the Tombstone squad, a team of marines sent into mainland China to extract VIPs shortly after a bloody coup attempt. The story also involves a number of heavily scripted sequences that revolve around your character making poor decisions that you'd never make as squad leader. Short and frustrating do not make for a good story mode.
To be as clear as a squad leader can be, do not buy this game if you're looking for a solid FPS campaign mode.
Instead, multiplayer is where it's at in Battlefield 4.
There is also a deep powerful feeling that captures the awe of destruction so often found in combat. Battlefield 4 is a game where you'll occasionally want to stop and take a look at the world around you. Landscapes are gorgeous, combat is engrossing, and the scale of destruction is tremendous. Battles lines appear to stretch on for miles across both land and sea. And you can fight anywhere and any way you want. You can run across the battlefield, ducking in and out of cover, or you can board a helicopter, hop on the minigun, cut enemies to shreds, then hop off the gun and repair the helicopter while in flight
Commander mode returns in Battlefield 4 to allow you to command your squads and call in air strikes. You'll have to reach Rank 10 first in order to play as a commander and when you do you'll play on a top-down map that shows the position of all of your squads, all of the capture points, and all enemy troops that have been spotted. A typical sequence of Commander mode events sees you ordering squads to march to a capture point, calling in a UAV to scan the area for enemy squads, marking them on the map, and then calling in a jammer UAV to help your squads avoid enemy scans. During combat you can call in a supply drop or a cruise missile or send in reinforcements. The only drawback to Commander mode is that squads controlled by humans don't have to actually follow your orders. This adds an element of chaos to game play that made me pretty frustrated. On the other hand, I was playing with a bunch of strangers whereas an organized clan would probably gain more value from a coordinated attack as the individuals would want to listen to their commander.
Another improvement to Battlefield 4 is the "Levolution" system which leverages the Frostbite 3 engine in order to create and destroy environmental elements during multiplayer sessions. On one map this involves an enormous skyscraper tumbling to earth. On another a storm comes along and causes a ship to crash into an island. On another a gas main explodes and rips open the street. These don't have huge effects on game play but they are very cool to watch. My favorite is the big storm which is an almost awe inspiring thing to watch—the sky gets darker and darker, the wind whips up, and then the ship comes sliding through the map with the sound of screeching metal.
Reality Check
Battlefield 4 is not without its flaws. While most multiplayer maps achieve the right mix of open area, cover, and capture points, some (like Zavod 311) don't. It's incredibly frustrating (and not very fun) to repeatedly try to make it to a capture point only to get gunned down in essentially the same spot every time. In addition, Battlefield 4 for PC has been plagued with bugs since its release—there's even a class action lawsuit against EA as investors assert that the company lied about the status of the game's development in order to ship for holiday 2013 and inflate the stock price. Reports online indicate that DICE put every other project on hold to fix this bug ridden release. I have experienced very few crashes, maybe because I've applied every patch within minutes of release. I've read about crashes during campaign mode that will lose your progress and instability in online multiplayer that boots people off of servers in the middle of a game.
The question on every gamer's mind is "which FPS should I get right now, Call Of Duty: Ghosts or Battlefield 4. My take on it is that first you should decide if you want a campaign mode or not. For those who like playing solo, COD: Ghosts has a better campaign mode and a very good multiplayer mode. If you prefer massive online multiplayer battles, BF4 is the way to go.
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