Sorry, solo gamers, Battlefield 1943 can only be bought and played online. There’s no single player campaign, no option to fight bots – there isn’t even the option to run around the maps on your own (unless you’re playing the tutorial). It’s all about human vs human FPS combat; a game so perfectly balanced to accommodate and encourage the randomness of online play that it simply wouldn’t work with AI.
Tricky review to write, this one. Tricky review indeed. You see Battlefield 3 is really two separate games fighting for attention in the same package. One of them (and arguably the one that most of the series' core fanbase are interested in) is very, very good indeed. The other, despite looking very pretty and seeming to have the best of intentions, is a formulaic, often-shambolic mess of thing, which stumbles into the territory of the downright broken at times.
So the question is, does one ignore the crap and rate the game based upon the best bits, or take Battlefield 3 as an overall package and adjust the score accordingly? I'm going to have to do the latter, because Battlefield 3 is an overall package, and a review cannot simply be written for a selected group of gamers. I will however, be breaking things down a bit in my text so that you can contextualise what the final number means for you personally. My position clear, let's get on with this, shall we?
It’s finally arrived – and while the silly story, drab voice acting, contrived dialogue and limp characterisation made us wince more than once, the world that it takes place in is more than enough to compensate for said errors. For the uninitiated out there, the story of Bad Company is this: you play Preston Marlow, a new recruit in B Company (hence the title) working with a ragtag threesome of war vets in the midst of a
Appropriately enough Bad Company 2 begins by kicking the doors in and unloading a shotgun blast of thrills in your face. Following a brief, straightforward prologue you’re pitched into the snowy wastes of Alaska (not to mention 24-style intrigue) as the Bad Company boys stumble across a Russian plot involving a terrifying experimental weapon. Given that almost every gun you can pick up here doubles as a grenade launcher, that’s quite a threat.
Due to the arcade nature of its combat and presentation, Battlestations: Pacific screams “average!” at you from the off. While it’s tempting to dismiss it as a bland arcade fly-fly bang-bang game, this would be doing it a great disservice. It falls between that particular stool and the one marked “Incomprehensible simulation”.
Xbox Live Arcade has become home to a number of decent series of games, mostly having to do with one publisher repackaging all of their classic titles. Sega’s done it, Capcom’s readying to do it, and Atari has been trying desperately to reach deep into their back catalogue and make some of their groundbreaking games feel relevant again. So far, they haven’t been very successful. And now we have Battlezone, the classic tank battle game that used vector graphics to create a 3D playing field.
Even with the universal praise that Sega’s Bayonetta has already received, we remained sceptic about its overall goodness until we got to grips with it. After all, it’s only following the same slash ‘em up template as Devil May Cry and God of War and little more. Or so we thought.
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