awkwardreviews

Battlefield has always been a series that I found to be fascinating, everything about it screamed “just another FPS!”, this is of course how it looks like. However, there are a few crucial factors about a Battlefield game that separate it from the title of “just another FPS”, and that’s its massive maps, and vehicle based combat.
Battlefield 4 is not exception to this rule, ever since battlefield bad company, the game had fantastic destruction to go alongside the great vehicle warfare. Although this game isn’t something revolutionary and new, it still improves on almost everything Battlefield 3 included, and it’s the better game for it.

Campaign: The campaign is fairly unremarkable… it spans just about 4-6 hours, and that in itself is weak. However, unlike the god-awful battlefield 3 campaign, this one strives to tell a more personal story about a squad of soldiers. This was a great choice by whoever wrote the story, as I by the end I could remember all the characters names, and even like a lot of them.

Its story isn’t half-bad either, something that’s both exhilarating and touching in some areas. And I can’t say there was a single moment in the game where I was downright bored. I feel that around six hours is an understandable length for an “on the rails” shooter like this one.

I can’t continue without mentioning how spectacularly beautiful the game is. I can easily say it’s the best looking game ever to be released, and the frostbite 3 engine is a technical masterpiece. It not only improves the textures of the ground, buildings, and even weapons tenfold over Battlefield 3, but it also makes the lighting and shading impressive.

Although you are placed head first into a “map”, during the single-player, the game still gives you enough room to explore and approach the target the way you want to. It utilizes the destruction much better than Battlefield 3 did.

Multiplayer: This is what we have all been waiting for, the multiplayer is the TRUE reason to buy a game like this. And it does not disappoint in the slightest.

Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not revolutionary or a far cry away from Battlefield 3. But every single little tweak that it adds, every single little perk and pickup makes the gameplay experience THAT much better.

The levelution system that they added was simply music to my ears. I have to say, apart from the massive game-changing events that you can trigger, like sky-scrapers collapsing, or dam’s breaking and flooding the map, my favorite bits of levelution are the smaller changes. For example, you can switch off the lights, making true “in-the-dark” combat that you can utilize to sneak up and kill your enemy. This is the biggest, and most welcome change.

It isn’t the only one either, the game comes with a plethora of new and old weapons. Each one feeling slightly different than the last. Also, the customization system has been improved as well, making you able to add more attachments to your weapon. On top of all of this, they added a smoother UI to the PC version of the game, making navigating the screen easier.

All of this accompanied by a solid “battlelog” system that they implemented in battlefield 3, the game is more than just an upgrade, it’s a pleasure. As soon as you enter the game you will feel the similar feeling you felt when you first played battlefield 3, however, that feeling will triple when you see the massive buildings collapsing as the destruction gets bumped up five notches.

The multiplayer is something that I will be playing for months to come as I fight my way to the highest rank, having a blast the entire way through.

Consensus:

                Overall, the entire product is solid, the campaign, although short and a bit unremarkable, offers enough visuals to sustain you for the time being. However, the multiplayer is once again the gem of the series, blending almost photo-realistic visuals with 64-player vehicular combat with such fluidity and precision you cannot help but snicker and laugh at the failed Call of Duty title that launched this year.

This is a great title, from a great company, with a great life-cycle. All I can say, in this time of great joy, is see you on the battlefield.

Grade: B+ 

                I’m not one to have these rapid-fire reviews, for gaming anyway. Especially when a game has this massive expansive multiplayer that takes you hours upon hours to get accustomed to. So, it’s been just about a week and a half since I got “Ghosts” and after I beat the campaign, and played unlocked everything in multiplayer, I find myself ready to do a full on review. So let’s start off with the campaign.

Campaign: A call of Duty campaign has never been something I adored, all the “Modern Warfare” campaigns felt so benign and cliché, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the word “Bro!” popped up every so often to disrupt the endless explosions and shooting.

                So when I heard Infinity Ward (or whatever they are now) said they will be creating this “unique and touching” campaign experience. I was of course… underwhelmed. I tend to not get excited for video games as much as I used to. The entire engine looks shoddy, and even the campaigns choreography is less of a technical marvel, and more of a technical snoozefest. Nothing they do in this campaign is unique or exciting, most of it is just sub-par voice acting with a cliché story.

                The dog… oh how much you have been hyped! Was this hype worth it though? NOPE! We get to see the dog a few times, but mostly in the starting missions, and then he just disappears from the game for a while. So… that was sort of dumb!

                The games campaign is pretty unremarkable, it lacks whatever the modern warfare campaign had, and seriously lacks whatever the black ops campaigns had. I want to get it straight that the black ops (and black ops II) campaigns were surprisingly fantastic, in my opinion. The voice acting was gorgeous, the set pieces were spectacular (especially in the second one) and the stories were actually fascinating and very well written.

                So in the end, the campaign does its job in giving you an overlong shoot-em-up experience with little flare or visual finesse.

Extinction mode: Extinction is a mode Infinity Ward slapped onto this latest Call of Duty to combat the rabid “Zombies” fanbase that Treyarch created. Let me just say, I was never a huge Zombies fan, however, I loved the whole “upgrading” and “mystery box” system enough to play with my friends.

                In Extinction mode, they ditch all of that and set you on a linear path. It is once again, quite unremarkable and boring. However, I must say that the aliens look good enough, and they have this odd movement pattern that is somewhat refreshing to the zombies “roar and run” tactic of attack.

                I really can’t write too much about Extinction, it is drab, it doesn’t have much life to it. And after about ten or so games, I felt like I was bored out of my mind and just went back to the multiplayer.

Multiplayer: Here is where the “Ghosts” experience truly fails. I was never really excited for “Ghosts”, in fact, my expectations were just for the game to be somewhat interesting, with new guns, and new attachments.

                To my surprise, they have none of that. This multiplayer experience is absolutely dreadful. Not because it runs badly or anything either, it runs fine. It’s just the most hackneyed and lazy multiplayer I’ve played in years.

                I was a big fan of Black ops II, and perhaps my expectations were STILL too high. However, in my humble opinion, this is just heresy. The graphics were downgraded to an unbearable low, especially on the consoles where the game looks like the call of duty: Modern warfare Beta with a horridly ugly grey tint that covers every single map you play on.

                Each call of duty, while not completely unique and new, still managed to add new weapons and attachments and at least somewhat of a new enough experience to keep me entertained for a few months. But, if I’m honest, this was shocking to see. Instead of adding more weapons, more attachments, more customization. They added LESS!

                I cannot customize my weapon as much as I could in black ops 2, also, they removed that amazing Score-streak system in place for Modern warfare 3’s half-asses Point-streak system. The character customization is boring and not worth your time, and the entire concept of building your squad is dreadful as well. It hardly adds anything new to the experience, to the point where the game feels like an overly simplistic wreck that still manages to confuse me.

                They made every map large, for Call of Duty standards, so it takes a decent amount of walking around to even find an enemy. Every weapon has a shockingly similar shot sound to the weapons in modern warfare 3. It just seems like they truly failed at making this multiplayer experience anything but downright boring.

                Overall, the game looks bad, the multiplayer adds hardly anything worth noting. And every single feature that they said was new, ended up disappointing me to no end. The perk system was garbage and overdone, the soldier customization was horrible, and even the gunplay was worse than battlefield’s (a vehicle oriented game).

                The campaign was a clichéd “bro-fest” of childish explosions and bad dialogue. And the extinction mode felt too forced and one-timed that I didn’t feel entertained while playing it.

                In the end, this game does the bare minimum in a time where Call of Duty needed to assert itself. Next generation is being released, and this recent entry lagged behind the rest of the games, even more than I expected. Infinity ward, you have failed to provide anything but the barest of the bare, the most boring and dreadful multiplayer experience call of duty has put out in a while. And if I were to add one thing that I enjoyed about this game, it was the ability to finally set my controller down after I unlocked all of the pathetic amount of weapons in this disappointing game.

Grade: D