Battlefield 3's Campaign is Shit

BF3's single player campaign is a total shambles. The perfect example of style over substance. It looks pretty but it plays like a pig.

After a seen-it-a-billion-times-before opening level set on a train, you relive - via flashbacks - past events in which you shoot a load of faceless bad guys while stuff explodes in the background. Uninspired nonsense.

A particularly tedious level has you sitting in the back seat of a fighter jet while the pilot shouts incomprehensible army-speak at you for 12 hours before anything remotely interesting happens. When the action finally kicks off - shooting down enemy fighters - all you're asked to do is move your cursor over a target, wait for it to go beep, and push a button. I've had more interesting shits to be honest.

This sense of detachment, of not really contributing to the action in any significant way, continues throughout the campaign. I felt like a spectator rather than a participant during the action. I guess it's how a front line war correspondent must feel, in amongst the whizzing bullets and shrapnel but ultimately nothing more than an observer.

When fighting on open ground it's hard to suss exactly where enemy fire is coming from. And because it only takes a few shots to die, a real sense of unfairness and frustration soon creeps in.

I wonder, is the player's sense of detachment an inevitable part of modern warfare's impersonal methods of murder, or is it simply because BF3 is a bad game? I'm opting for the latter. Clocking in at a laughable 4 hours, it's clear that BF3's campaign was nothing more than a lazy afterthought.

My first clue came when I opened the box. This is the first video game I've seen in which the campaign has been relegated to the second disc. This should tell you everything you need to know about where Dice's priorities lie: the mulitplayer.

In a nutshell, the game plays out across countless, heavily scripted set-pieces, rubbish QTE sections and genuinely tedious on-rails moments. If you're thinking about purchasing Battlefield 3 for the campaign, don't. It's one of the worst single player experiences on the Xbox.