Clearly designed as a PC first person shooter first, Battlefield 3 on the Xbox 360 is an exercise in compromises. It ships on two discs (one for single-player, the other for multiplayer), and requires a 1.5 gigabyte installation to the hard drive if you want its proper HD visuals. Its massive maps allowing for sixty-four players at once had to be chopped down and now hold up to twenty-four players instead. There’s no getting around the fact this is a watered down release for consoles, yet Battlefield 3 manages to be a very fun game despite that. Anyone looking for a good military-themed first person shooter will find it in even this console release, and it has much to offer.
As a first person shooter, Battlefield 3 is pretty easy to understand. Players are given their choice of weapons from a pool of modern firearms and set loose to kill everyone not on their side while accomplishing various mission goals. You’ll have access to all the usual suspects, ranging from pistols and revolvers to assault rifles, sub machine guns, sniper rifles, shotguns, rocket launchers to deal with enemy vehicles, and various little gadgets to help you out with miscellaneous tasks. Realism is a loose guideline, as bullet wounds can be treated by simply backing away from combat for several seconds until your auto-healing kicks in and you’re fairly accurate even while moving although standing still to aim is notably better in many cases. Lethality takes a similar ’sort of realistic’ approach, as a shot to the head from most weapons will almost always be fatal or close to it, but a rifle bullet to the chest isn’t necessarily the end of you (though one or two more shots will usually take care of that).
Set in the real world, roughly present day, single-player mode has you play as a soldier who is initially tasked with dealing with rebels but ends up having to stop weapons of mass destruction from being used on civilians and hey wait a minute... didn’t I just play a game with basically that same plot, called Ace Combat: Assault Horizon? It even uses the same cutscene format and mid-mission QuickTime Events, the only differences are that Battlefield 3’s single-player campaign is mostly a first person shooter with more emphasis on infantry combat instead of jet fighters (which I concede is a significant difference) and isn’t as good since it isn’t the focus of the product. Perhaps it’s best to not worry about the story mode too much, and instead look at Battlefield 3’s excellent multiplayer modes.
The online play is easily the best thing here, offering support for either two player co-op sessions or versus play for up to twenty-four people. Versus play is divided into a few different modes, with the most simple (and seemingly most common in my experience) being Team Deathmatch though others with mission objectives such as planting explosives in an enemy team’s base are available. These objective-based modes are easily the greatest thing Battlefield 3 has to offer, combining infantry combat with a variety of vehicles. Players can jump into bomber planes, jet fighters, helicopter gunships, APCs, tanks, and even boats to get around the stage quickly and bring impressive amounts of firepower to bear. Many of these vehicles even support crews, so friends can jump in and use certain weapons the driver can’t. This mix of on-foot and in-vehicle fighting is very fun, and has some favorable similarities to the MMOFPS "PlanetSide" albeit on a smaller scale.
