Yo guys,
The first time I tried to fly a helicopter, a few good men died on the landing pad. On attempt two, I got airborne before landing in the ocean. On lucky number three, I flew that bird as god intended, making long sweeps around hotspots and waiting for Wagner to kick in. This is the life, I thought, lazily hovering towards an enemy squad. Too low; the blades hit a tree, I lost control, grunts scattered below, and the ground span wildly – dead. Multi-kill! Taking out enemies this way is one of the many reasons Battlefield 4 is amazing.
Housekeeping first though, because the singleplayer campaign isn't one of them. The best you can say is it's a well-executed take on this generation's familiar FPS cliches, until an abrupt and disappointing multiple-choice ending. Firing the guns feels great, but the entire exercise has an air of redundancy – enemy behaviour you've seen before, scene ideas you've played before, and even the seemingly-obligatory torture scene. The template for this stuff is 2007's Modern Warfare, and despite BF4's near-constant spectacle, the years have not been kind.
Still: who cares? Battlefield has a singleplayer campaign because it has to have one, but this series is so loved because of multiplayer. The key feature is destructibility; any structure can be chipped away by gunfire or blown apart by explosions. It's one of those things that sounds like an incidental feature until you pop off a few shots at a tank then hide in a building – at which point the tank's driver, quite sensibly, fires at the wall and takes you and the house with it.
The destructibility gives this world an atmosphere, makes it feel more solid. Bullets chew up masonry as you fire down corridors, explosions puff out obscuring clouds of dust, and shelter becomes open ground. This theatre of war crumbles during the show, and it's an environment done full justice by surround sound that picks out skittering footsteps, the crack of a sniper's bullet, or the overwhelming impact of a tank shot.
The polish extends far beyond BF4's more obvious charms to systems like squad spawning or the AI mic chatter that flags enemy targets. These tie together large groups of players and large objective-based maps, forging fast links between random players and giving reinforcement waves an underlying rhythm. So many small features are a delight; I love 'spotting' enemies by pulling the R2 trigger, which means you forego opening fire for a second to flag their position for the team. It's a slightly risky choice but a heavily rewarded one, so players like me keep on doing it, and the whole squad benefits.
Guiding behaviour like this is the mark of a great developer, but what makes Battlefield brilliant is in how this setup leads to endless one-off situations and emergent battles. Multiplayer's main mode is Conquest, where three to five objectives have to be fought over and held – some of these are flags in mini-arenas, and some of them are flags on things like a skyscraper.
By :WebX
