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A new Battlefield game hits the shores in Battlefield 4 and another series of levels which each last an hour or so and see you going from A to B, leading your men and blowing the enemy into next week, unless they get you first.
I could go into detail about your mission and what you’re meant to do, aside from the early on where you have to evacuate American VIPs from Shanghai, but regular fans of the series will be familiar with what to expect in what is again a linear first-person-shooter, although that’s not a problematic issue, it’s just the way the franchise works. What I will detail is the stunning locations in which you’re about to set foot, such as Baku, Shanghai, South China Sea, Singapore, Tashgar, Kunlun Mountains and Suez.
Some good points about the game:
- Pressing R2 to ‘Engage’ when prompted will highlight all the baddies in the area so that your men can rain down bullets on them. Similarly, there are occasionally friendly forces in the area and by doing the same thing, you can effectively ask them to unleash hell on the enemy as well.
- It does feel good in terms of putting you right in the heat of the action, so for example, I’ll be stood behind a pillar and as the enemy is firing at me while I reload, bits of the pillar will ping off as you’d expect when bullets hit them. However, this isn’t a perfect system. The game talks about how you can reduce skyscrapers to rubble, but not everything has this built into it so when in the Shanghai level, a tank is chasing after me and I’m giving it the runaround so I can find somewhere safe to place a landmine for it to drive over, it frequently boomed out its shells but they all hit a minor piece of concrete which comes across as completely impregnable. That looks a bit ridiculous, really, but it’s nothing new in games. You can see this fairly late on in the video shown within this review.
Last decade’s Red Faction series had a similar feature, with similar good and ridiculous results.
- Aurally, there’s sound to wake up the dead in Battlefield 4, especially in the aforementioned tank scene which was giving my subwoofer a run for its money. There are also some lush graphics to behold, but sometimes it doesn’t quite go to plan as the tank’s turret shows in the video below, as it pokes through the wall…
And some gripes:
- It can be confusing where you’re meant to go next, so you’ll be in a place where you’ve shot all the existing enemies, then your men will hide behind barricades, leading me to trigger the next ‘scene’ by running about aimlessly until I find a baddie or three for us all to shoot at.
- This also happened, to annoying effect, on the Shanghai level, when I raced ahead but my men were hanging back for no particular reason. Why did this happen? Because I didn’t traverse over one particular piece of the area at the time, so when I retraced my steps, I triggered what I missed previously and then we were all on our way. That’s a bit daft, really.
Overall, the game doesn’t feel as engaging as it should be, because of these gripes. They take you out of the moment and, generally, it didn’t grab me as much as other games around at the moment. It’s still certainly worth a look, but maybe not as your first purchase.
If you really want to spend another £40, you can buy Battlefield 4 Premium which includes:
- Five digital expansion packs featuring new maps and in-game content.
- Two-weeks early access to all expansion packs.
- Excluive personalization options including camos, paints, emblems, dog tags and more.
- Priority position in server queues.
- New weekly content and challenges
- 12 Battle Packs, which are digital packages that contain a combination of new weapon accessories, dog tags, knives, XP boosts, and character customization items.
In fact, three of the packs are included with all pre-orders of the Origin Digital Deluxe edition. This service will also transfer your Premium membership from the PS3 to the PS4.
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Important info:
- Publisher: EA Games
- Players: single player campaign, multiplayer: 2-22
- HDTV options: 720p/1080i/1080p
- Dolby Digital 5.1 sound: Yes
- Spoken language: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, Russian
- Subtitles: English only
|
GRAPHICS SOUND GAMEPLAY ENJOYMENT |
8 8 7 6 |
| OVERALL | 7 |
Director: Tom Keegan
Writers: Jesse Stern, Mikael Säker and Adrian Vershinin
Music: Jukka Rintamäki and Johan Skugge
Cast:
Dima: Pasha D Lychnikoff
Commander: Elena Caruso
Mother Chen: Ann Hu
Clayton ‘Pac’ Pakowski: Andrew Lawrence
Molina: Juan Gabriel Pareja
Bohai: Allen Theosky Rowe
Commander: Michael Shen
Captain Roland Garrison: Patrick St Esprit
Jin Jié: Alain Uy
Huang ‘Hannah’ Shuyi: Jessika Van
Major Greenland: Stephanie Vickers
SSgt. Kimble ‘Irish’ Graves: Michael Kenneth Williams
Admiral Chang: Ping Wu
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.